Storage vendor Seagate Technology has become a corporate sponsor member of the OpenStack Foundation and Open Compute Project to work on cloud-storage solutions.
OpenStack is an open-source cloud-infrastructure operating system. The Open Compute Project, started by Facebook, is an open-source community for design of data center IT hardware, power and cooling infrastructure as well as design of data centers themselves.
“Today’s explosion of data has forced cloud and big data customers to constantly look for ways to improve their storage infrastructure while lowering their total cost of ownership,” Scott Horn, Seagate’s VP of marketing, said. “Seagate is excited to take the first of a number of industry changing steps in joining the open-source community and leveraging our vast knowledge of storage and cloud-optimized solutions to help foster the growth of cloud storage solutions.”
Seagate is joining about 150 companies who are members of the two organizations, including Rackspace, Red Hat, AT&T, Cisco, HP and Dell.
“We are excited to welcome Seagate to the OpenStack community,” Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, said. “Their commitment to open cloud architecture and extensive storage expertise will benefit the whole community.”
Dan Iacono, IDC’s research director for storage in cloud solutions, said choice of architecture and data portability were key factors influencing cloud customers' buying decisions. "Clients do not want to be locked into vendors or proprietary architectures,” he said.
“Seagate’s commitment to open communities, such as OpenStack and Open Compute, where people with similar philosophies about cloud architecture and open source software and hardware openly collaborate together to develop the best solution possible is only going to benefit all stakeholders, consumers and the industry in general.”