SAN JOSE, Calif. – The storage industry has just started to harvest opportunities in non-volatile memory, and there may be an opening for a new play in open source. Those were just two observations during a wide-ranging interview with Greg Huff, chief technology officer at LSI Corp.
Facebook’s Open Compute Project (
OCP) and the
Open Networking Foundation are defining open source projects around computing and networking, respectively. In addition,
OpenStack and others are creating open source code for cloud computing, but no broad project has yet emerged for open source storage, Huff suggests with a broad smile.
OCP defines an open hardware rack that includes storage but “what will be a future need is physical and logical management, including storage management,” said Wayne M. Adams, Chair of the
Storage Networking Industry Association that also is developing an open source version of its Cloud Data Management Interface for Openstack.
But Adams was skeptical about a broader opportunity. "There is no major significant gap in the industry for storage functionality whereby a new open source project needs to be launched," he said.
LSI's Greg Huff is bullish about the prospects for open source storage but didn't elaborate.