Linux Foundation Brings Together Industry Leaders to Advance Cloud Object Storage Technologies

Industry seeks to advance object-based, software-defined storage on Ethernet-enabled storage devices with support from Cisco, Cleversafe, Dell, Digital Sense, Huawei, NetApp, Open vStorage, Red Hat, Scality, Seagate, SwiftStack, Toshiba and Western Digital

SEATTLE, LinuxCon/CloudOpen/ContainerCon— August 17, 2015 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced a new effort to define and promote open source software and standards for cloud object storage technologies.

The new Collaborative Project is the Kinetic Open Storage Project and includes founding members Cisco, Cleversafe, Dell, Digital Sense, Huawei, NetApp, Open vStorage, Red Hat, Scality, Seagate, SwiftStack, Toshiba and Western Digital.

The Kinetic Open Storage platform has gained broad interest from both hardware and software players in the storage industry and is seen as a foundational technology for providing open source object storage on next generation, Ethernet-enabled storage devices.

“Storage technologies are becoming increasingly complex as the cloud, virtualization and container technologies converge. Open source software and standards can speed the evolution of storage technology to support these areas,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation. “The Kinetic Open Storage Project will allow industry leaders to address new challenges head on and support rapid growth through a community-developed protocol specification and libraries.”

 The Kinetic Open Storage Project provides both Ethernet connectivity and a key/value store that allows storage applications to access drives directly without the need to be managed by a storage server. This creates value both in terms of performance and lower total cost of ownership. The new project will manage the open source libraries, APIs and simulators interfacing with Kinetic-based drives. OEMs will now have a choice of drive vendors for Kinetic-based drives. In addition, developers of storage solutions can utilize vendor-agnostic open source libraries and APIs to create new applications leveraging the power of Kinetic-based drives.

The Linux Foundation is home to a variety of industrial-scale open source projects called Collaborative Projects. It has become recognized for its role in providing a neutral home, governance best practices and promotional services for open source projects poised to transform a market or advance critical technologies. The founding members value this neutrality and expertise in building a large community of developers to explore and utilize this technology for the cloud. 

For more information about the Kinetic Open Source Project please visit: http://www.openkinetic.org/

Comments from Members

Cisco

“Software-defined storage provides the foundation for enabling applications to get closer to their data by managing their infrastructure and not just being passive consumers of it. The Kinetic Open Storage Project, backed by industry heavyweights and the open source community, will advance the state of storage for users around the world,” said Seth Mason, Principal Architect, Cisco.

Cleversafe

“As the requirement for Petabyte-scale storage becomes increasingly common, we see the need for collaborative industry efforts to accelerate the development of key enabling technologies in order to address some of the associated challenges,” said Rob McCammon, Senior Director of Product Management at Cleversafe. “Cleversafe is proud to support the Project as a founding member and we look forward to collaborating with our industry peers to address the storage challenges of today and tomorrow.”

Digital Sense

“Virtualization fundamentally changed compute. Kinetic Open Storage will do the same for storage,” said Michael Tran, CTO, Digital Sense. “The Kinetic Open Storage Project will enable us to collaborate and advance in a neutral forum where together as an industry we can address a modern problem with a modern solution.”

Huawei

“As the cloud technology becomes ever more popular, cloud storage has been playing an increasingly vital role and facing big challenges in the architecture evolution, especially when it comes to the support of multi-tenancy,” said Qingchao Luo, Cloud Storage Architect, Huawei. “Linux Foundation Kinetic Open Storage Project would be an attractive platform for cloud storage development, meanwhile Huawei’s storage team has done some research in this field for several years and accumulated lots of experiences. Huawei is willing to contribute our idea and work with Linux Foundation Kinetic Open Storage Project to promote object drive technology together.”

Open vStorage

“Innovation and storage technology is in our DNA. Today’s storage requirements force us all to think out of the box and keep an open mind when reviewing existing storage solutions,” said Tony Bogaert, VP Corporate Development, Open vStorage. “We are looking forward to contributing to the Kinetic Open Storage Project for the benefit of the industry and customers.”

Red Hat

“It is good to see the Kinetic Open Storage Project taking an open approach to building interfaces for Ethernet attached drives,” said Sage Weil, creator of Ceph and Chief Architect, Red Hat. “There is a tremendous opportunity for these devices to make us rethink how we build and deploy the compute and storage components of scale-out systems and the best way to facilitate both innovation and interoperability is through an open community process. The Linux Foundation will be a good venue for this work.”

Scality

“The Kinetic Open Storage Project is a milestone as it further decouples hardware and software as a building block for true scale,” said Giorgio Regni, CTO of Scality. “Scality was built upon the idea that through software, we enable enterprises to achieve true hardware freedom, scale out capacity and performance limitlessly while maintaining 100% reliability – themes that are shared in the mission of The Linux Foundation and the Kinetic Project.”

Seagate

“We are proud to be partnering with The Linux Foundation on the Kinetic project as we believe that this technology is the next great step in the evolution of massively scaled-out storage,” Rocky Pimentel, president, global markets and customers, at Seagate. “By aligning the Kinetic project with our partners under the Linux Foundation the project now has strong validation within the industry and shows Seagate’s support of open source technologies in providing solutions to the most challenging problems of data storage.”

SwiftStack

“The OpenStack Swift community was early to embrace and support Kinetic, and we feel the Kinetic Open Storage Project will further align Kinetic with meeting the growing needs of cloud workloads,” said Joe Arnold, Chief Product Officer, SwiftStack. “With support for Kinetic today in the SwiftStack Controller, we fully agree that open source is the ideal way to harness collaboration and advance the state of the art for data centers, enabling freedom of choice to deliver optimal value.” 

Toshiba

“Explosive growth in unstructured data is driving enterprises toward scale out storage architectures to achieve lower total cost of ownership,” said Steve Fingerhut, Senior Vice President of the storage products business unit for Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. (TAEC).  “Toshiba is delighted to work with this alliance to develop scale out solutions that address these growing storage needs.  We believe that supporting this open source platform and relying on developers from around the world will bring down the overall cost and lead to large scale deployments, helping fulfill our customers’ needs.”

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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