As a followup to the previous post on Forrester’s recognition of OpenStack’s growing prominence as the de-facto private cloud operating system, I wanted to quickly note the gradual transformation of a major proprietary vendor, EMC, from first an open source naysayer to onlooker to finally morphing into a open source participant in critical communities in distributed computing like Cloud & Big Data. This is testament to the ascendence of the open source community in building out web scale systems and data architectures.
Here is a great blogpost by Dorian Narvesh of EMC on their new reference architecture program.
http://pulseblog.emc.com/2015/05/19/emc-going-big-at-openstack-summit-vancouver/
In Dorian’s eloquent words –
“What a difference an year makes! EMC as a bystander in Atlanta to an Event Sponsor in Paris and today a Premier Sponsor in Vancouver. Crawling, walking, and now running!”
EMC are not just certifying their suite of storage arrays (EMC VNX and XtremIO) as well as their Software Defined Storage (ScaleIO & ViPR), and Brocade switches (an EMC partner and much talked about EMC acquisition target) on partner distributions like Red Hat, Mirantis and Canonical but are also putting in a rigorous optimization process.
Reference Architectures will be released for all the above distros in the course of time. The below is the one they just released with one of the above vendors (all from the EMC blog).
EMC are also creating new drivers for these products to certify them with OpenStack Cinder and Manila for the Kilo release. EMC’s high level contributions to the broader OpenStack community are highlighted in the slide below.
Couple all of this with the just announced open sourcing of one of their core software defined storage controller, ViPR which provides storage automation functionality. This is EMC’s foray into creating their first open source community based on one of its commercial software products.
http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2015/20150505-02.htm
The upshot of all of this is that EMC customers now have a range of choices in terms of OpenStack cloud whether it is an end to end EMC solution, or, Red Hat or Canonical or Mirantis or the upcoming VMware distro of OpenStack.
Kudos to EMC on this significant accomplishment!