Five ways to experience UnStorage at Red Hat Summit

Welcome to Red Hat Summit 2018 in San Francisco! The Storage team has been hard at work to make this the best possible showcase of technology and customers—and have fun while doing it. This year our presence is built around the theme: UnStorage for the modern enterprise.

What is UnStorage?

Today's users need their data so accessible, so scalable, so versatile that the old concept of "storing" it seems counterintuitive. Perhaps a better way of describing the needs of the modern enterprise is UnStorage, as outlined in this blog post by Red Hat Storage VP and GM, Ranga Rangachari.

Five ways to experience UnStorage at Red Hat Summit

1. Content is king: We have 24 sessions packed with storage knowledge, best practices, and success stories. Over 21 Red Hat Storage customers will be featured at the event, including on a panel at our breakfast (open to all attendees) on Wednesday at 7 am at the Marriott Marquis. Learn how some of the most innovative enterprises leverage the power of unStorage to solve their scale and agility challenges.
2. Without hardware partners, it’s like clapping with one hand: By definition, the success of software-defined storage hinges on the strength of the hardware ecosystem. Since the storage controller software is only half the solution, it’s important to have deep engineering investment with hardware and component vendors to build rock-solid solutions for customers. With partners like Supermicro, Mellanox, Penguin Computing, Intel, Commvault, and QCT, all featured at the conference, Red Hat Storage enables greater customer choice and openness—a key tenet of UnStorage.
3. Explore your storage curiosity: UnStorage is all about breaking the rules to make things better. You’ll find a lot of creative ideas that are off the beaten track. Just as UnStorage is ubiquitous—it stretches across private, public, and hybrid cloud boundaries—it’s hard to miss Storage at the conference. You can find storage lockers near the expo entrance where you can drop off backpacks and charge phones while you attend sessions. Or enter to win one of two Star Wars collector edition drones by attending sessions or visiting the booth. Stop by the Storage Launch Pad to play online games, take surveys, and pick up a ton of giveaways, including two golden tickets handed out every day, which will afford you a special set of prizes.
4. Test drive storage: Kick the tires on UnStorage with one of three test drives for Ceph, Gluster, and OpenShift Ops. As the name suggests, software-defined storage is completely decoupled from hardware, making it easy to test and deploy in the cloud. On the other side of the deployment spectrum, you can also try out the sizing tool for Red Hat Storage One, our single SKU pre-configured system announced last week. Stop by one of four Storage pods on the expo floor for demos and conversations with Storage experts.
5. The proof of the pudding: Stop by Thursday’s keynote with CTO Chris Wright and live demos by Burr Sutter and team featuring container-native storage baked into Red Hat platforms such as OpenShift. UnStorage is as invisible as it is pervasive. Modern enterprises demand that storage be fully integrated into compute platforms for easier management and scale. With container-native storage surpassing 150 customers in the last year alone, learn how customers such as Schiphol, FICO, and Macquarie Bank are building next-generation hybrid clouds with Red Hat technologies.

We’re not all-work-all-the-time at Red Hat Storage, though. Join us at the community happy hour or the hybrid cloud infrastructure party on Tuesday to blow off some steam during a long week. Our social media strategist, Colleen Corrice, is running a way cool Twitter contest: All you have to do is post a picture at a Storage session or booth @RedHatStorage with the hashtag #UnStorage to receive a T-shirt and be included in a drawing for a personal planetarium.

Finally, check out this infographic on all things UnStorage @ Red Hat Summit. Please check back for a daily blog through this week. We hope to see you at Red Hat Summit 2018.