Relying on a vendor that values and maintains a symbiotic relationship between upstream and downstream communities can pay big dividends for those investing in Managed Storage Services.
The choice is one of the most sought-after values in IT management. Most IT managers want to create and maintain flexible environments in which they can agile and change quickly to adapt to the emerging needs of their business.
However, the choice can be a double-edged sword. While in some ways it removes latency and inertia to provide faster response times, otherwise you can easily demand more resources, often at extra cost.
It takes an ecosystem ... or two
One of the challenges of having options is knowing exactly what to choose to meet your specific requirements.
There are two traditional ways to choose how to create an efficient storage solution for your organization. First, it is necessary to evaluate the prevailing storage vendors in the market. Each offers its own end-to-end solution that includes software, hardware, firmware, utilities, and operations support.
The problem comes when you want to do something different, something that dares with what the shrink wrapper offers. You are “tied” to this supplier now that you have made a significant investment in their products. You have few or no options, and any options can be extremely expensive.
Open-source storage and software-defined memory
The second way is to take advantage of the open source ecosystem. This open ecosystem includes many communities, each of which contributes significantly to the underlying solution. These communities, in turn, have many resources to choose from and are not mutually exclusive. You can choose to distribute open source software. You can choose server hardware. In the storage example, you can even choose from a wide variety of component manufacturers (networks, SSDs, etc.) and the vendors of the application software needed to “complete” the solution.
Enter the open world of choice
From the perspective of Red Hat, we see communities that are "upstream" and "downstream" of us.
Upstream is an open collaborative community in which software is developed. Major manufacturers of processors, hardware components, software, and even online service providers all contribute to development by participating in various projects along with customers and others who have made significant contributions to the vast amount of open source software available today. ... These contributions expand the circle of developers working on exciting new features and capabilities. They also drive innovation because you rely on the diverse interests of a broad development team, rather than on the research and development resources of a single vendor. For example, Intel has made a significant contribution to the work on tuning and improving the performance of the source code, and the French cloud IaaS company Outscale has made a significant contribution to the work on the RADOS Gateway (RGW).
Downstream are the various vendors that “produce” the software, thereby creating business value for the users. Red Hat has built its business by providing a stable and predictable distribution of open source products. This value is especially interesting for two software-defined storage offerings, Ceph and Gluster, whose production customers rely on stability, including the hardware it runs on. In fact, great software without equally comparable hardware is like clapping with one hand. In fact, the entire underlying ecosystem must be sustainable. Red Hat's software-defined storage ecosystem includes storage server vendors such as Cisco, Supermicro, and QCT, who are working with Red Hat to optimize, tune and provide guidance on how best to use open software-defined storage in their server clusters. It also includes SSD component manufacturers and network providers who provide their knowledge and best practices for specific types of Ceph and Gluster workloads, such as high or high performance IOPS. And independent software vendors (ISVs) provide additional features or provide actual applications that customers implement, such as data reduction, file syncing and sharing, backup /
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