As you may have noticed, yesterday the Linux Foundation announced that Dell EMC is joining the OpenSDS effort and contributing code in the process. This follows a long list of events in which we have demonstrated increasing levels of participation in open source communities and ecosystems. When we open sourced ViPR Controller and created the CoprHD community, we were responding to our customers. Theyr’e the ones who feel the pain every day when devices don’t work together. They’re the ones who tell me in person about their difficulties with storage interoperability. I’m not the only one hearing this – my fellow colleagues who have also joined the OpenSDS community have experienced the same. In fact, it is so important to us that we deliver on our promises that we are inviting our customers to participate in this community. We hope to share with you which ones very soon.
It used to be that getting storage vendors to collaborate or even be seen in the same place was something akin to a scene from The Godfather movies. Often we have joked about getting “the 5 families” together to combine forces on something, often with disappointing results. But the fact is that those of us in the storage industry see the same trends as everyone else. We know that our customers are moving forward in an ever-changing world, from virtualization and containers to new automation and orchestration frameworks based on Kubernetes, Mesos, Ansible and a host of other technologies that didn’t even exist 5 years ago. In this new world, our customers want multiple layers of technologies to be able to work together. They demand better – and theyr’e right.
With Dell EMC’s contribution of the CoprHD SouthBound SDK (SB SDK) we’re staking a claim for better interoperability. The SB SDK will help customers, developers and every day users be able to take some control over their storage interoperability, with an assist from the OpenSDS community. Right now, you can create block storage drivers pretty easily, with the ability to create filesystem and object storage drivers coming up later next year. The reference implementation you see in the GitHub code repository is designed to work with CoprHD and ViPR Controller, but over time we hope to see other implementations in widespread use across the industry.
Join our webcast today to learn more – it will be recorded for future viewing for those who cannot make it today.
Thanks!
John Mark Walker, Product Manager, Dell EMC
