Red Hat’s Approach with Open, Software Defined Storage (A Four Part Series)

Part 2: Community Driven Innovation

By Steve Bohac, Red Hat Storage Product Marketing

Two weeks ago, we posted the blog “Open Software Defined Storage – Don’t Get Fooled By The False ‘Open’ and Get Locked-In Again”. Coincident with that blog, the IT analyst firm Gartner placed ‘Software Defined Anything’ in its list for Top IT Trends for 2014. With this proclamation, as well as recent discussions in the storage market about software-defined storage, we wanted to spend some time to discuss the graphic shown in our original blog and what Red Hat’s approach is to this important and growing market trend and why we believe that a truly open approach will ultimately win the day. Today’s entry is the second in a four part mini-series.

First of all, let us make one thing clear: there is much more to being open than providing developers API access. Red Hat’s offering is truly OPEN - Open Software-Defined Storage uses open source software, providing innovative features powered by a vibrant developer community and the benefits of volume economics by running the software on standards-based commodity hardware. The result is agile, scalable, loosely coupled environments for unstructured data storage.

The Red Hat Storage approach combines leading open source technologies (Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Gluster FS) for a full and open software stack. Similar to our approach and strategies with other open source efforts, we sponsor the Gluster community to help drive upstream the innovation in our Red Hat Storage offering. As the graphic below shows, the Gluster.org community now has greater than 30 community generated projects (and growing) and over 170 active developers in the Gluster community forge (25 non-Red Hat contributors). Currently, there are 60,000+ Gluster downloads per month. That is something to be proud of!

For more information, go to: Red Hat Storage

For more information on GlusterFS, go to: Gluster.org

For questions, contact a Red Hat representative