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Linux Foundation Launches New Conference, ‘Vault,’ to Address Growing Demand for Linux-Based Storage and Filesystems - Linux Foundation

Written by The Linux Foundation | Aug 28, 2014 7:00:00 AM

Vault will be co-located with the invitation-only Linux Storage, Filesystem and Memory Management Summit, providing attendees with access to the leading minds in this area

SAN FRANCISCO, August 28, 2014 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, is proud to announce the launch of a new conference, Vault, to bring together the world’s leading developers in filesystems and storage in the Linux kernel with related projects to collaborate on continued innovation and education in this important space. Founding supporters of Vault include Facebook, IBM, NetApp, Omnibond, Red Hat, SanDisk, Seagate, and SUSE. The conference will take place March 11-12 at the Revere Hotel in Boston, MA.

Data, filesystems and storage are at the heart of today’s computing environment, with innovation required to accommodate the need for more data storage capability, at faster speeds with today’s newest hardware. Linux has been at the center of these advances with its widespread use in cloud computing, big data and other data-intensive computing workloads. Additionally, hardware vendors recognize the importance of Linux with many working directly in the Linux community to develop cutting-edge storage hardware, helping transform Linux into a leader in the storage industry.

Co-located with the invite-only and exclusive Linux Storage, Filesystem and Memory Management Summit, Vault will tap into the expertise of developers leading filesystem and storage innovations in a general technical conference setting open to everyone to address all these trends. The goal of Vault is to create a place where companies leading development in these areas can network with users and developers to advance computing.

“90% of the world’s data has been created in the last few years and most of that data is being stored and accessed via a Linux-based system,” said Linux Foundation Chief Marketing Officer Amanda McPherson. “Now is the ideal time to bring the open source community together in this new forum, Vault, to collaborate on new methods of improving capacity, efficiency and security to manage the huge data volumes envisioned in the coming years. By bringing together the leading minds of Linux file systems and storage and our members who are pushing the limits of what is possible, Vault should expand the state of the art in Linux.”

The Linux Foundation is also pleased to announce the Vault Program Committee, which includes prominent community members working on storage and filesystems today. Committee members for Vault include:

●       James Bottomley, SCSI maintainer and CTO, Server Virtualization at Parallels

●       Mel Gorman, senior kernel engineer at SUSE and chair of the Linux Storage, Filesystem & Memory Management Summit    

●       Chris Mason, Linux kernel developer at Facebook

●       Alex McDonald, industry evangelist – Office of the CTO at NetApp

●       Erik Riedel, senior director, Technology & Architecture at EMC

●       Ted Ts’o, Linux kernel hacker at Google

●       Ric Wheeler, director of Red Hat Storage Engineering at Red Hat

Developers and technical users in the fields of Linux-related storage and filesystems are invited to submit speaking proposals for Vault. Proposals are sought on a diverse range of topics related to storage, filesystems, Linux, and open source, including:

●       Object, Block, and Filesystem Storage Architectures (Ceph, Swift, Cinder, Manilla, OpenZFS)

●       Distributed, Clustered, and Parallel Storage Systems (GlusterFS, Ceph, Lustre, OrangeFS, XtreemFS, MooseFS, OCFS2, HDFS)

●       Persistent Memory and Other New Hardware Technologies

●       Filesystem Scaling Issues

●       IT Automation and Storage Management (OpenLMI, Ovirt, Ansible)

●       Client/server filesystems (NFS, Samba, pNFS)

●       Big Data Storage

●       Long Term, Offline Data Archiving

●       Data Compression and Storage Optimization

●       Software Defined Storage

For more information on Vault, visit http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/vault. Additional details will be released in the coming weeks.

Additional Resources

YouTube: The Linux Foundation Event Experience (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WUeelICQ2U)

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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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo, Tizen, and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

 Supporting Quotes 

“We’re very enthusiastic at Facebook about the launch of Vault,” said Blake Matheny, Manager for Kernel Engineering at Facebook. “Like countless other individuals and companies we are keenly aware of the challenges presented by growing data volumes and complexity, and believe that the collaborative effort being organized by The Linux Foundation will help address the future of storage and filesystems.”

“Data growth and expansion of data to the cloud has highlighted the importance of storage and data management innovation,” said David Dale, Director, Standards & Industry Associations – Office of the CTO, NetApp. “NetApp’s long involvement in the activities of the Linux Foundation is focused on providing organizations with the resources to drive this innovation, enabling customers to evolve their business. We believe there is a gap in the market that the Vault Conference can fill, and we support its growth and success.”

“Omnibond strongly believes in the future of open source software collaboration, which is why we are supporting Vault from its inception,” said Boyd Wilson, an executive at Omnibond, “As data volume and complexity increases and the associated problems that arise, it is the perfect time for The Linux Foundation to organize an event that will bring the open source community together to find the answers that will benefit the entire storage industry.”

“As a long-standing supporter of The Linux Foundation, Red Hat is excited to participate in the initial planning of the Vault conference to help lay the foundation for an interactive event with the storage developer and user communities,” said Ric Wheeler, director of storage software engineering, Red Hat. “Because a company’s data is one of its most critical assets, we see a growing need for robust and scalable Linux-based software-defined storage solutions to effectively store and manage all types of enterprise data. Red Hat looks forward to participating with our colleagues in the Vault conference and help make open source storage systems ready for the new wave of enterprise storage.”

“SanDisk views Linux and open source as being at the epicenter of today’s enterprise and cloud data centers, as well as a key component of advanced laptops smartphones, and tablets,” said Nithya Ruff, director, Open Source Strategy Office, SanDisk. “Vault will help further community collaboration and foster the development of wider interoperability and speed innovation of Linux-based solutions, which will benefit all.”

“The growth of big data is creating huge opportunities for many, but along with these opportunities come challenges for storage and filesystem management,” said Mel Gorman, senior kernel engineer at SUSE. “These challenges need to be addressed in a unified manner. SUSE is pleased to support The Linux Foundation in the launch of Vault, which will enable members of the open source community to come together to create effective and lasting solutions in filesystems and storage.”