The Sun Also Sets

Just as 62% of Sun's shareholders last week approved Oracle'stakeover offer multiple stories crossed my desk, OK my screen, relating to thecombination of data deduplication technology and Sun's ZFS file system.  Add in speculation about Oracle's plans forSun's various product lines and what Larry Ellison will do when he controls twounrelated storage (Sun and Pillar) companies and Sun seems to be on everyone'smind.

Just as PC clone upstart's acquisition of DEC showed thatthe minicomputer era was really and truly over Sun's demise indicates the endof the proprietary processor/OS model even if that OS is a Unix variant. WhileI'm too old, and hopefully too wise, to predict the end of the mainframe I'mpretty sure that Intel and AMD's merchant x86 processors, and of coursescale-out architectures, have made the high performance midrange system a relicof the 20^th century.

We first heard about the combination of ZFS anddeduplication last September when Rhode Island startup GreenBytes startedshowing off their Cypress integrated storage system, based on SUN's X4540hardware as well as OpenSolaris, that used their ZFS+ file system that addeddeduplication and compression to the open source ZFS.

Given ZFS's similarity to NetApp's WAFL, which has resultedin its own set of litigation, and how cleanly NetApp added basic deduplication toWAFL the combination of ZFS and deduplication has a lot of potential. When youthink about the hybrid storage model that allows ZFS based systems to use largequantities of relatively low cost MLC flash memory as a read cache and deduplicationtogether applications like VDI/VMware View hosting start to look veryattractive.Now we stories about Sun releasing deduplication as part ofZFS themselves including a Keynote session at last week's Kernel conference in Australiatitled "Deduplication in ZFS".  Thisbeing America we also have lawsuits flying back and forth between Sun and GreenByteswith Sun saying:

"GreenBytes has been trying to entice Sun to acquireGreenBytes or to become an investor. GreenBytes invited Sun to reviewGreenBytes' claimed de-duplication process pursuant to the parties' NDA. WhenSun ultimately rejected GreenBytes' overtures, GreenBytes responded by makinggroundless claims that Sun had misappropriated GreenBytes' deduplicationprocess."

As well as accusing GreenBytes of infringing on the ZFStrademark and registering the ZFS+ trademark without permission.

GreenBytes on the other hand has accused Sun of using their technologyin Sun's own deduplication efforts.

How did this once friendly relationship fall apart? We maynever know.  I'm sure the scrutiny of thearmies of lawyers working out the Oracle acquisition didn't help.  Someone at Sun may have also been upset aboutGreenBytes rasing $7.5 million in May (SEC Filing here) and talking aboutfollow up models that weren't based on Sun hardware.I just hope we see the combination of ZFS and Dedupesoon.  Wonder what the Nexenta guys willdo with that.