Seagate Joins OpenStack, Open Compute

Hard drive maker Seagate is joining two open source cloud organisations – the OpenStack Foundation and Open Compute Project – with a view to influencing the way storage devices figure in their hardware and software specs.

One of the world’s largest manufacturers of storage devices with over 30 years of history, Seagate plans to take part alongside software vendors like VMware,  cloud providers such as Rackspace and hardware makers like Intel and Cisco in creating open data centre blueprints.

Open sesame

OpenStack, launched in 2012, is a cloud computing project based on free and open source software released under the terms of the Apache License. Meanwhile, Open Compute is an initiative announced by Facebook in 2011 which sees the largest IT industry players share efficient, low-cost data centre and hardware designs.

From today, Seagate will join the community of over 150 organisations as a corporate sponsor member in order to “define and promote open source standards for cloud computing”. Other members of the OpenStack Foundation and Open Compute include Rackspace, Red Hat, Cisco, HP and Dell.

“Today’s explosion of data has forced cloud and big data customers to constantly look for ways to improve their storage infrastructure while lowering their total cost of ownership,” said Scott Horn, Seagate’s vice president of marketing.

“As an industry pioneer, Seagate is excited to take the first of a number of industry changing steps in joining the open source community and leveraging our vast knowledge of storage and cloud optimized solutions to help foster the growth of cloud storage solutions,” he added.

“Seagate’s commitment to open communities, such as OpenStack and Open Compute, where people with similar philosophies about cloud architecture and open source software and hardware openly collaborate together to develop the best solution possible is only going to benefit all stakeholders, consumers and the industry in general,” commented Dan Iacono, IDC’s research director for storage in cloud solutions.

Earlier this month, Seagate began to offer 100GB of free storage to anyone wishing to try its EVault cloud backup service, highlighting the stiff competition in this market.

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