In its Top IT Trends for 2014, IT research and advisory firm Gartner placed 'Software Defined Anything' as one of the factors that will influence the IT market in the coming year. Within the storage market, software-defined storage is rapidly gaining importance and becoming a growing market trend in countries like Saudi Arabia.
Open software-defined storage is transforming the way organizations tackle their data management challenges. More and more companies are seeing how it can open up the opportunity to significantly reduce costs, efficiently contend with the exploding data landscape and support today's increasingly software-defined and hybrid data centers, all while discovering the new roles and value software-based storage platforms can bring, now that open software-defined storage is enabling organizations to take data, as is, out of the box. Open software-defined storage creates agile, scalable, loosely coupled environments for unstructured data storage.
One area that customers often ask about is what do you mean by open? In fact, it's not uncommon for the traditional vendors to slap the word "Open" in front of their proprietary solutions to deliver the perception of open. However, open has deep meanings and values that stretch well beyond marketing terminology and APIs (application programming interfaces), but instead focus on enabling open innovation starting with the customer.
OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGY EXPLAINED
Today, open source is driving much of the innovation around data whether it be OpenStack for IT infrastructures or Hadoop for big data and analytics. This is happening to such an extent that many proprietary vendors are being forced to adopt some components of open source technology, whether they want to or not, which can lead to confusion and the risk of IT getting trapped once again in a "false Open" and locked-in situation, which will constrain innovation and introduce hidden costs.
There is a simple formula when considering whether you've accidentally stepped into the "false Open" trap:
Open + Open = Open
Open + Closed = Closed
Open technology together with open collaboration, powered by open source technologies deliver a truly open platform. Open technologies plus closed technologies, still lock you into proprietary solutions, limit your innovation and introduce hidden costs.
So what does "Open" mean for a software-defined storage platform? Here is our view:
- Open from vendor lock-in;
- Open to use your infrastructure of choice, whether it be physical, virtual, or the public cloud;
- Open extensibility to integrate and extend with other applications and infrastructure;
- Open development of the entire platform, not just the bits that are convenient;
- Open community innovation and open source is driving today's innovations around data;
- Open to run applications on the storage, converging compute and storage; bringing applications closer to the data;
- Open to directly contribute, influence technology based on your innovation needs.
Some of the traditional vendors are loosely applying the term "Open" to the front of their technology or marketing without delivering the true value of "Open". When looking at so-called "Open" software-defined storage solutions, please put them to the test. Apply the formula above to see if you are locked in and where. Review the checklist above. Doing just these two things will help you avoid the traps of a "false Open."
As senior director of Product Management and Marketing, Scott Clinton leads Red Hat's Storage and Big Data businesses. He has over 15 years of experience in the high-tech industry across the fields of Information Management and Security, Mobile Enterprise Computing and Collaboration, Data Management/Storage and Appliances, Software Development, Enterprise Middleware, and Cloud Infrastructure, Networking.
Zawya 2013
