#LinuxCon Berlin Huawei today announced #OpenSDS, an open-source project to replace vendor-specific storage controllers and says it has the weight of enterprise and external storage number-one #Dell #EMC behind it. It’s understood OpenSDS was presented to Linux Foundation reps on a recent visit to China. The idea is that vendors’ products would plug into one side of the finished OpenSDS and third parties’ tools and software, such as #Docker, #Kubernetes or #OpenStack, into the other. OpenSDS aims to replace the litany of proprietary management frameworks underpinning storage. It's analogous to the Eclipse Framework in software tools from the 2000s. Eclipse eradicated an entire culture of proprietary IDE frameworks for something that was open and extensible. Eclipse not only brought down barriers to development for IDE plug-in providers, it also saved the IDE makers the cost and time to constantly update their individual frameworks' IDE plumbing. Cameron Bahar, Huawei storage senior vice president and global chief technology officer, told The Reg at LinuxCon, Berlin, that some storage vendors have as many as 37 storage management frameworks in their own companies - although he wouldn’t name names. Some vendors have open-sources elements of their own management tools and drivers, but they have generally been aimed at solving specific issues and have followed lobbying by big names such as Intel. With OpenSDS, however, Huawei wants to sweep away this piecemeal approach. A formal announcement is expected next month, Bahar told The Reg, adding that Dell EMC had become the first - and arguably the most influential - storage name to throw its weight behind OpenSDS. “The point is to get vendor support and bring lots of vendors together,” the CTO said. “There’s an opportunity for Dell EMC and others that would like people to interoperate.” Bahar said he reckoned it would be impossible for storage firms to hold out against OpenSDS once there were more names onboard. This would mean less lock-in through the storage management layer and genuine competition among firms on the capabilities and features of their storage hardware and software. Also, it would mean customers could quickly take advantage of new trends moving through storage, such as containers and cloud, as developers could easily target the open framework rather than waiting on the storage vendors themselves to update their own proprietary software. “Once there is critical mass, they [vendors] have to join, to compete on the storage technology, not the controller.” OpenSDS would define the interfaces, common management APIs and simple orchestration that would be made generally available to the community and updated on an ongoing basis through open source. The framework would provide the discovery, provisioning and orchestration and potentially be capable of talking to virtualized, containerised and bare metal environments. Two open-source projects that would immediately benefit are Kubernetes and OpenStack. Kubernetes must be implemented differently for each vendor's storage controllers despite the fact that it is solving the same issue of persistent storage. Using OpenSDS, just a single agent could be developed. OpenStack, meanwhile, does have the Manilla and Cinder projects for file share and volumes but lacks basic storage management functionality for discovery, configuration and management. Again, a single agent could be built through OpenSDS that would solve this.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/04/huawei_dell_emc_open_source_storage_play/
