American all-flash storage specialist Pure Storage has joined the OpenStack Foundation, an organization responsible for the development of an open source, vendor-agnostic cloud platform.

Pure will contribute US$25,000 annually to the Foundation’s coffers and participate in development of the code, especially projects related to storage.

To mark the occasion, the company has launched new tools that improve compatibility of its flash arrays with OpenStack-based infrastructure, available immediately at no charge.

“OpenStack is one of the most vibrant and significant open source projects of our time, and is rapidly emerging as the de facto standard for the creation and management of private and public cloud environments for service providers, in the enterprise, and beyond,” said Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of products at Pure Storage.

“We are delighted to expand and formalize our support for OpenStack as both a corporate sponsor and collaborator, and look forward to joining the thriving community of developers and technology innovators that are contributing to the platform’s maturation and adoption.”

Flash for the open cloud
Pure Storage, a US start-up founded in 2009, takes consumer flash memory and transforms it into affordable enterprise-ready solutions. Even though it sells hardware appliances, all of the company’s intellectual property is actually in software and data reduction algorithms. The company claims these algorithms allow it to offer “flash at the price of disk”.

Today, the company has joined OpenStack to help develop a free and open source cloud framework. OpenStack currently consists of 11 interconnected projects or ‘modules’ distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, so the code can be altered by any vendor and adopted to their own requirements.

Pure has also announced two new solutions for OpenStack-based private and public clouds. The first is a driver for OpenStack Cinder, a block-based storage management module that can now be fully integrated with its Purity Operating Environment.

The second is a development toolkit that extends the functionality of Cinder via Python scripts, enabling automation of snapshot policies, replication, IO statistics, and capacity management. Both rely on RESTful APIs and help Pure’s FlashArray range more tightly integrate with open cloud deployments.

“Snowballing interest in OpenStack has made support for the cloud management platform an important - and in some cases, vital - competitive feature for infrastructure products such as Pure’s all-flash storage systems,” commented Tim Stammers, senior analyst at 451 Research.