SanDisk, Seagate And Western Digital Join The Linux Foundation

Three of the world’s largest storage device manufacturers have joined the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organisation that manages the development of the open source OS.

SanDisk, Seagate and Western Digital will contribute their expertise in disk and flash drives to Linux and support the Foundation with donations which could range from $20,000 to $500,000 per year, although the exact amount hasn’t been specified.

The Foundation has also signed up US semiconductor manufacturer Adapteva and software development hosting service GitHub.

“Our new storage members are embracing a more software-centric approach to storage and also value openness as a way to generate rapid storage, flash and disk drive innovation,” said Amanda McPherson, Chief Marketing Officer at The Linux Foundation.

“We look forward to their ongoing contributions to Linux and Github’s visionary leadership on code collaboration and development.”

The announcement was made at the annual LinuxCon North America conference in Chicago.

New blood

The Linux Foundation was established in 2007 to manage and guide the development of Linux. It sponsors the work of Linus Torvalds and is supported by a network of more than 200 technology companies including ARM, HP, Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, Oracle and Samsung.

Members participate in initiatives, workgroups, and events aimed at advancing Linux as a business platform, and support the Foundation financially, depending on their membership level: silver, gold or platinum, with the last one reserved for those who donate at least $500,000 each year.

Now, this influencer group grows by another five members, with three of them involved in storage. SanDisk is one of the few companies that make their own flash memory chips. It supplies mobile device and PC manufacturers, as well as marketing its own range of SSDs and PCI-E solid state accelerator cards.

Seagate has been making hard drives since 1979, and offers the industry’s broadest portfolio of storage devices. “Linux Foundation membership will help accelerate Seagate’s R&D and product development with data storage, while offering our customers lower TCO and optimal performance,” said Mike Miller, engineering director at Seagate.

“By embracing open collaboration and technologies, Seagate is able to offer highly competitive, optimized, and scalable server and storage solutions for the cloud.”

Another new member is Western Digital, the world’s largest manufacturer of hard drives. “We are joining the Linux Foundation because we believe open source will play a key role in driving developments with new, imaginative solutions for solving emerging storage challenges,” said James Borden, director of Enterprise Storage Marketing at Western Digital.

GitHub, founded in 2008, is a cloud-based hosting service for software development that uses the Git revision control system. Git was originally created by Torvalds to manage the work on the Linux Kernel, but has since become an industry standard for open source projects. As part of the Foundation, the company will be advocating for the growth and adoption of Git.

The last member to join the Foundation is Adapteva, which makes energy-efficient multicore processors for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. The company already sponsors the Parallella Project aimed at democratizing access to supercomputing.

“Leveraging Linux and open source for the Parallella Project, our goal is to enable the critical research and education needed to finally make parallel computing ubiquitous in the marketplace,“ said Andreas Olofsson, CEO and founder of Adapteva.

“As Linux Foundation members, we’ll be able to bring the benefits of open source and parallel processing to scientific computing, telecommunications, and embedded applications as quickly as possible.”

What do you know about Linux? Take our quiz!