The impact of open source on data storage management

Open-source data storage offers a great deal of flexibility, but unlocking its benefits will require strong technical resources to meet requirements such as stability, high availability and security

FREMONT, CA:, In 2016, a group of firms teamed together to address a critical storage management challenge that they and their customers were facing: managing a heterogeneous storage footprint that was impeding storage and data service rollout.Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, Intel, and Vodafone launched the OpenSDS (open software-defined storage) project, an open-source project hatched under the Linux Foundation at the time, to build a community to address those concerns in a generic and standardized manner.

Customers wanted a platform or framework to connect to different kinds of storage to do monitoring and deployment instead of a single vendor for storage.

While OpenSDS pioneered the road for virtualized storage that pools several storage systems together, the Soda Foundation goes a step further by cultivating an ecosystem of open-source data management tools and capabilities that spans the edge to the cloud. Soda, which stands for Soda Open Data Autonomy and is made up of seven key projects, is a recursive acronym for infrastructure management, multi-cloud data management, and application programming interfaces (APIs), among other things.

Soda is a loose framework that any user or vendor may alter or enhance to match customer needs and experts consider that OpenSDS and the Soda brings everyone together to find a solution. End-user organizations and big open-source software and storage providers are all coming on board, whether or not they consider their work to be part of the Soda framework.

Rancher Labs, for example, created the open-source Longhorn project to provide a Kubernetes-compatible cloud-native distributed storage infrastructure. SUSE, which bought Rancher Labs in 2020, is a big supporter of the Longhorn storage project, which is being developed as a sandbox project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). SUSE also contributes to the Ceph project, which aims to create a unified solution for a scalable object, block, and file-based storage.