Much of the success and popularity of open source technologies is due to new, large web-scale companies, like Facebook and Amazon, building better, more innovative data center designs with open source technologies. These new designs, while having some similar patterns to the traditional, offer the business the agility, scale, and flexibility it needs to make the digital transformation all without being locked-in to their technology decisions with specific vendors.
Traditional companies see the success and value of these new designs and look to provide the same benefits to their business by updating their environment. Randy Bias explains this view of cloud computing and what EMC’s role is in the open source ecosystem. EMC has and will continue to adopt open source with these changing times. The new techniques on display from these newer, web-scale companies built on open source technologies are being brought to the traditional enterprises of the world and EMC, as a leading technology provider, is helping their customers make this transition.
EMC already has a history of contributing to the OpenStack community and offering the necessary drivers to make sure their products can connect and work in an OpenStack environment. However, EMC is expanding their contribution and increasing their commitment. The announcement of CoprHD, EMC open sourcing of their software-defined storage product ViPR, is a big step in taking down the walls and changing the perception of the old, proprietary-only, closed EMC. EMC also offers a free, non-production version of their ScaleIO software for customers to experience.
In addition, EMC is partnering with the right players and distributors of OpenStack to help our customers build their open sourced clouds with EMC storage through reference architectures with Mirantis, Canonical, and RedHat.Overall, EMC understands it is no longer about a single platform, but rather the integration into the entire open source ecosystem. Listen to Dorian Naveh explain EMC’s strategic history with OpenStack.
Other companies are following suit with their own open source strategy. The big, traditional technology providers like HP and IBM are also making significant investments in the open source ecosystem. The trend continues to gain momentum, the writing is on the wall, OpenStack is maturing, and none of the big players want to miss out.