In a recently published IDC Vendor Profile on Red Hat as a Storage Solutions Provider, IDC stated, "The commoditization of storage and the open source storage stack is in essence a disruptive and unstoppable force that will change the ways of the traditional storage market dominated by vendors selling proprietary hardware and software."1 We agree with IDC and this blog will go into more about what’s behind the "unstoppable force" IDC sees causing such a sea of change and how Red Hat is impacting this revolution.

Controlling and managing the massive explosion of unstructured and semi-structured data is a painful reality for IT management. Costs associated with data storage have skyrocketed and customers are crying out for innovative storage solutions that lower costs, lessen complexity, and deliver software technology to enable them to more effectively manage data for the modern datacenter.

As datacenters continue to modernize by adopting open platform, virtualization and cloud technologies, storage options have largely remained unchanged – holding back the levels of innovation and modernization possible in the datacenter while increasingly eating up more and more of the available IT budget.

Red Hat Storage offers a revolutionary approach to storage, aligning with datacenter modernization initiatives while meeting the challenge of cost-effectively gaining control over the deluge of unstructured data. Red Hat Storage delivers an innovative, enterprise-grade open software solution for scale-out storage that helps enterprises cope with and manage the explosion of big, semi-structured and unstructured data growth. Red Hat Storage can be deployed across physical, virtual, public and hybrid cloud resources to deliver a unified storage and data platform. IT management can also now capitalize on the cost benefits of volume economics resulting from using common-off-the-shelf x86 servers to reduce overall storage costs at scale while breaking free from proprietary storage vendor lock-in.

In the past decade, Linux and high volume x86 servers transformed the server market. In the coming decade, we expect open source storage solutions to transform the storage market and, ultimately, the way businesses operate.

Click here to download the full IDC report on Red Hat as a Storage Solutions Provider. Visit here for more information on Red Hat Storage.

1 November 2012, IDC #237976, Volume: 1 Storage Solutions: File-based Storage: Vendor Profile