Open source software (OSS) has had a profound effect on several software markets, such operating systems (Linux, OpenSolaris and the various BSD Uni), webservers (Apache), databases (MySQL), blogging (WordPress and others) and a number of others. The benefits to users include lower prices for commercial products, higher quality products – both OSS and commercial, and greater choice. All in all, OSS is Very Good Thing for the IT industry.

Alas, the OSS storage arena hasn’t been as blessed as, say, webservers, where Apache holds a majority of the server market. There are a couple of nascent storage management initiatives, Aperi and Storage Revolution. The latter is meeting at SNW to write a spec. I wish them luck. The SMI-S spec is big and getting competitors to agree on what and how they will implement it will take some doing, so it will be a moving target for some time.

Yet there are real open source storage products out there that you can contribute to today, even if you aren’t a coder. Many of these projects could use help with things like documentation, support, improved functionality and interoperability testing. You can work on these projects to gain experience that could lead to a higher paying job, or to meet the geek girl of your dreams. Or just for the satisfaction of knowing you are helping improve vital digital infrastructure for fellow practitioners around the world.

BTW, this is a partial list. These just looked like the best bets in a variety of applications.

The projects
Here’s a selection of OSS storage projects that are shipping today.

AMANDA backup
Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver is a 15 year old OSS project. You’d think they’d be done by now, but no, plenty of new work to do. I think that backup is the sweet spot of storage management software, since most commercial backup products are cash-cows and not getting much new investment. Also, AMANDA writes the commands needed to unpack the tape as the first block, so unlike proprietary formats, you can be confident of getting your data back in 20 years – even without the application. That is security. For coders they have a number of projects you can run with. Itching to write documentation? Check out the documentation page. AMANDA is commercially supported by Zmanda.

OpenSMS and OpenTMS
A big knock against OSS is that it isn’t “commercial grade”, though some of the commercial stuff out there isn’t “commercial grade” either. These two projects were commercial StorageTek products that the company donated to OSS. OpenSMS is a former HSM (excuse me, *ILM*) product, while OpenTMS is a mainframe tape management system. These folks would like help supporting the software on more operating systems – as commercial products they supported lots of them – and on more file systems.

Cleversafe’s Open IDA
A secure method of storing enterprise data on public infrastructure. You don’t need encryption because it takes several sites, that don’t know about each other, to put the data back together again. I also think it could be used in a campus environment to create highly available storage using low-cost infrastructure.

Openfiler
Openfiler is a NAS implementation with an impressive feature list.

File-based networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV and FTP. Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes) and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5.

Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, iSCSI (target and initiator), scheduled snapshots, resource quota, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols a breeze.

Check out Openfiler projects here. Openfiler is also commercially supported by Xinit Systems.

ZFS
ZFS is the very cool filesystem/volume manager/software RAID that Sun open sourced and that I believe Apple is porting to the next version of Mac OS X. There are opportunities to port ZFS to other operating systems and more. Get started here.

OpenAFS
OpenAFS is a version of the cool distributed file system Andrew, from Carnegie Mellon. AFS is also a commercial product offered by IBM through their acquisition of TransArc. OpenAFS has a number of open projects including ports, network enhancements, native Windows support and documentation.

ATA over Ethernet
AoE is an open spec protocol that several companies have already written initiators for. Its big advantage is that since it isn’t routable it doesn’t use many server cycles and its more secure. Using Coraid’s hardware you can build RAID arrays for less than a dollar per GB. Write a new driver or develop your own hardware, or ???. Check out AoE tools for more info.

As always comments welcome, pro or con. Moderation turned on to control comment spam but no registration required.

Update: I published the first half of this yesterday and completed it today. Rather than break it up into Parts I & II, I’ve combined them in a renamed version.