Ranga Rangachari, VP & GM of Red Hat, Inc., and Duane Decapite, the Director of OpenStack Product Management at Cisco Systems, Inc., have established a unique partnership between their respective companies under the OpenStack banner, based on the current trajectory of their shared technology.

According to Rangachari in an interview with theCUBE during the OpenStack Summit, “We’ve seen this trend shift over the last two or three years, where it’s no longer about scale up, but scale out. Whether it’s files or objects or blocks, it’s about how horizontal scaling happens without any degradation in performance or capacity.”

He continued: “We are absolutely seeing the trend where customers are moving to as software-defined everything. But a fundamental part of the software-defined architecture is you need to have real, I guess, enterprise-ready hardware that innovation happens on a daily, weekly basis to take advantage of that. So that’s where the Cisco relationship really comes in.”

A complete scale-out storage solution

On the technical side, Decapite said the two companies are also a good match.

“With this storage architecture … you overlay something like RedHat Ceph on top of it, and you have a complete scale-out storage solution … because the CRUSH algorithm allows the location of the storage to be computed rather than stored, there’s no single point of failure. There’s no controller, there’s no metadata server, and you combine that with UCS with the Active/Active Fabric pass and the high scalability, it’s a really nice scale-out storage solution.”

Rangachari explained further: “So an intrinsic part of the Ceph architecture is something called the CRUSH algorithm … CRUSH essentially stands for Controlled Redundant Under Scalable Hashing … When you’re talking about billions of objects and millions of objects, you need to have a hashing algorithm that’s not direct rebound. So the algorithm essentially is smart enough … that it knows where storage is placed, and then there’s no single point of failure.”

And according to Rangachari, “What we are working with Cisco on is classic CVDs that help organizations go back, and they take a lot of guesswork out of the system, which is ‘I’m running this kind of workload, what’s the best configuration that I can expect from the Cisco hardware and the Ceph software to work together.’ So that’s the overarching theme behind what we’re doing.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015.