We pick storage brains: Has object storage endgame started? IBM buying Cleversafe could mark the start of the endgame for independent object storage suppliers. We talked to Philippe Nicolas, who was Scality’s Director of Product Strategy until earlier this year and is now a storage industry advisor. We asked him questions about the state of the object market and its suppliers. His …
Well, a nice report from Mr. Nicolas on the dynamics of the object-based storage software vendor market. The incumbent IT vendors have pulled out their checkbooks to make acquisitions in order to fill the object-based storage "holes" in their storage product lines. The remaining venture-funded object-based storage software vendors will either get bought or go public, if they can. Interesting that Mr. Nicolas did not mention that Scality is aiming for an IPO in 2017. Amplidata and Cleversafe both use only erasure coding to protect data, and they have a litigious history with each filing suit against the other. Cleversafe has on the order of 350 patents, which could have made them more attractive to IBM in addition to having the CIA as a customer. Dell has a deal with Scality, which will likely end. Dell also had a three-year deal with Caringo that ended. HP has deals with both Cleversafe and Scality, although I suspect the deal with Cleversafe will be kicked to the side. Red Hat likes to collect open source software projects, so its acquisitions of Gluster and Ceph (InkTank) are not surprising. Gluster is not really object-based storage, and Ceph doesn't really excel as an object based storage software, but it can also be used for file and block storage. Swift does have scalability issues, although the 3.0 release of SwiftStack looks like it is making some progress on the feature and functionality side. Basho's Riak and Riak CS are geared more toward the developer market as opposed to the enterprise data center storage market. Riak CS is somewhat unusual in that it stores both the object data and the metadata in Riak. Caringo is one of the older object-based storage software vendors that seems to score a steady stream of customers, most recently BT. Cloudian has focused on delivering a packaged software and appliances that can be deployed by service providers or enterprise customers in public or private storage clusters. Cloudian also uses a native S3 API, which is fully compatible with the AWS S3 API and can tier data to either AWS S3 or Glacier. The object-based storage software vendor market is undergoing change, but it is hard to see any of them becoming "losers" in the market.
Just wanted to re-iterate that, as an open source project, Ceph is not exclusively "owned" by Red Hat (just as it doesn't exclusive "own" Linux).
For example, SUSE Enterprise Storage is based on Ceph. Others also package it up with OpenStack distributions, etc etc.
Well, the commercial entities "sponsoring" various open source software projects do get bought. Red Hat bought InkTank, which was the commercial sponsor established for Ceph, and Red Hat bought Qumranet, which was the commercial sponsor for KVM. Novell was once the the commercial sponsor or owner of SUSE. Yes, it is all open source and you are free to download and use it, fork it, etc. That said, commercial sponsors make money by charging for "enterprise" features and support not provided in the "subscription" release of the project. The project community generally handles the support function through forums.
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