Today I visited the Open Storage Summit EMEA 2013 held in the Mercure City Hotel in Amsterdam.
After a 2 hour drive I arrived at the venue, just in time to grab a cup of coffee. I poured the blackliquid through my throat as fast as I possible could without burning myself before being directed to the room because the keynote was about to start.
The opening Keynote was performed by Bridget Warwick CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of NexentaShe is now 3 months at Nexenta, but has a lot of experience in Storage. Warwick spent 10 years at NetApp.
So why choose open storage? Possible reasons Nexenta brings up:
- Deploy a single storage OS across all your major workloads. Bundling different technologies underneath.
- Cost savings are substantial, Capex mostly.
- The technology itself and the filesystem/ copy on write and mixed media.
More and more people nowadays are talking about Software Defined Storage, often leveraged with two other terms: Software defined networking and software defined datacenter.
Here is what Software Defined Storage Vision is according to Nexenta:
- Unified: block, file AND object (currently in development)
- Open: combination of open source and proprietary IP plus a focus on integration in the customers preferred framework
- Application Driven: provisioning, tuning configuration driven by application & use case (nexenta vsa for view for example) it is possible to automate the tuning of the storage using a configuration specifically directed at applications.
- Multi-level hardware-independant (VSA next to a variety of hardware (HCL)
Next up in the keynote was some sort of quiz, to see what the audience thinks of certain storage related subjects.
The question was who is using object storage, and later on who thinks of using Object storage is still in the development phase. most hands are for deploying it 12-24 months. The next question was how many of you use a vsa (any vendor) Only one man put up his hand.
After the questions Warwick gave the floor to the next speaker… to be continued
Update: The recorded session is available now: