UPDATED 14:52 EDT / MAY 13 2014

Open standards-based storage dominates conversation on Day 2 of #OpenStackSummit

hello my name is open sourceThe first day of this week’s OpenStack Summit in Atlanta centered on hybrid computing and the new community marketplace the governing body of the project has rolled out in hopes of establishing greater product transparency across the ecosystem. Today brings a change of pace to the conference, with storage  turning out to be the main theme for the morning. Several vendors are demonstrating solutions meant to make it more practical for traditional enterprises to build the kind of scale-out environments operated by Internet pioneers such as Google and Facebook today.

All-flash array maker SolidFire kicked things off with the introduction of its new Agile Architecture reference design. The blueprint combines the company’s flagship block storage system with S55 and S4810 switches from Dell and several of the hardware maker’s PowerEdge R620 servers running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform in a pre-integrated package that is touted as easier to deploy than competing converged appliances.

From an architectural standpoint, the design is the polar opposite of what Seagate, the symbol of everything SolidFire wants to disrupt, is going for with its Kinetic Open Storage platform. The toolkit is a  collection of free technologies aimed at reducing the overhead associated with retrieving data from disk through the use of Ethernet-connected drivers that eliminate most of the layers in traditional block-based file systems. It shares many similarities with the reference design HGST, a subsidiary of arch-rival Western Digital, is currently showcasing at the summit.

Earlier in the event, Seagate announced that it’s open-sourcing the application development interface of Kinetic, along with a number of core libraries, in a continuation of its push to secure solid footing in the OpenStack cloud ecosystem. The suite is already supported in a number of the project’s core storage components thanks to the efforts of partners like Inktank (which was recently picked by Red Hat for over $170 million and SwiftStack, which has also teamed up with HGST.

The two firms just revealed that they are joining forces to build an x86-based cluster for testing bare-metal deployments of the Swift object and blob storage component of OpenStack. The managed environment, which will be hosted by SwiftStack and incorporate hardware from HGST,  will be made available to the public free of charge in order to enable “better QA, reliability and quality control over code and releases” for the community, the companies said.

While SolidFire is continuing along the all-flash route and Seagate and Western Digital race to keep disk relevant in the hybrid cloud era, Supermicro hopes to combine the best of both worlds with a new hybrid rack machine powered by Inktank’s version of the OpenStack Ceph  object store and file system. The  10GbE platform ships with a standard 42U chassis and comes in three configurations, all featuring triple redundancy and designed to handle “extreme scale-out storage applications with maximum performance and reliability,” according to the company. It can be loaded with any mix of  3.5-inch HDDs and SSDS, which gives customers the freedom to tailor the cabinet to their specific requirements.

The data center whole is only as good as the sum of its parts

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Although the storage industry accounted for much of the news to have come out today from the OpenStack Summit, vendors in adjacent segments have kept busy as well.

On the networking side, Nuage, a venture of French telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, announced that the plug-in allowing its programmable Virtualized Services Platform to operate in environments running the latest Icehouse release of OpenStack has been added to the DriverLog. The community-led initiative focuses on tracking solutions that are compatible with the platform and provide up-to-date information on the associated drivers and plug-ins.

Over in the server space, AMD announced that its SeaMicro SM1500 hyperscale server set a new industry benchmark for OpenStack scalability. In an internal test, the chip maker provisioned a record 168,000 virtual machines on 576 physical hosts running Ubuntu 12.04 with Icehouse in what it hails as the “largest known demonstration of OpenStack scalability ever”. It  boasts that the first 75,000 VMs were deployed in just six and a half hours.

photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc

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