Storage for the modern enterprise

In early May, Red Hat put on its annual customer and community conference in Boston—Red Hat Summit—centered around a common theme: the power of the individual. Now more than ever, open source is seen as the most viable option as we enter the next phase of IT delivery, planning, and deployment.

The power of the individual on display

Red Hat has assumed the role of de facto open source leader, driving and nurturing hundreds of communities across the world. One could argue that, at the core, Red Hat isn’t a software company at all. In fact, our best asset is our ability to curate open source communities, bringing to bear the efforts of thousands of contributors, committers, and testers to enterprises in a reliable, secure package that can solve some of the most demanding IT challenges.

The end of planning as we know it

Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst, made a pertinent point in his keynote about the changing face of IT planning. “Planning harder” in an environment full of unknowns is complex and fraught with error. CIOs struggle to balance predictability with the inherent flexibility needed to maintain smooth IT operations.

Building IT infrastructure with open source and industry-standard constructs helps alleviate some of the planning challenges while addressing today’s pain points, much like interchangeable Lego® pieces can be used to build everything from two-story houses to skyscrapers, still withstanding the shock of an earthquake when needed.

Storage for the modern enterprise

With each passing year, it becomes apparent that traditional storage just isn’t going to cut it as enterprises look to create flexible, scalable, and cost-effective IT platforms for cloud-native applications. Simply put, legacy storage systems have failed to keep up with the way customers want to consume storage.

A key piece of the value proposition of software-defined storage is the hardware choice available to customers. For the second year in a row, a Storage Ecosystem Showcase in the partner pavilion of Red Hat Summit featured seven Technology Partners that complete or enhance Red Hat’s software-defined storage offering. Cisco, NGD Systems, Permabit, QCT, Seagate, Storage Made Easy, and Supermicro all demonstrated their wares.

In addition, several other storage partners, such as Dell EMC, Mellanox, and Penguin Computing, chose to sponsor their own booths. The solid upstream ecosystem combines with a growing downstream array of partners to truly differentiate Red Hat Storage.

Learn more

Storage was featured prominently both on the expo floor and in the news from the event. In addition to breakout sessions, Red Hat Storage engineers and consultants held a number of hands-on labs that were very well received. You can access similar self-paced material on the online AWS test drives (Gluster test drive and Ceph test drive) or at an upcoming webinar.

For a review of all the 2017 Red Hat Summit videos, click here. For a video recap with some of the Red Hat Storage team, watch this: