Open Source Definitely Changed Storage Industry

It’s not a breaking news but the impact of open source in the storage industry was and is just huge and won’t be reduced just the opposite.

For a simple reason, the developers community is the largest one and adoption is so wide. Some people see this as a threat and others consider the model as a democratic effort believing in another approach. Let’s dig a bit.

First outside of storage, here is the list some open source software (OSS) projects that we use every day directly or indirectly: Linux and FreeBSD of course, Kubernetes, OpenStack, Git, KVM, Python, PHP, HTTP server, Hadoop, Spark, Lucene, Elasticsearch (dual license), MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Cassandra, Redis, MongoDB (under SSPL), TensorFlow, Zookeeper or some famous tools and products like Thunderbird, OpenOffice, LibreOffice or SugarCRM.

The list is of course super long, very diverse and ubiquitous in our world. Some of these projects initiated some wave of companies creation as they anticipate market creation and potentially domination. Among them, there are Cloudera and Hortonworks, both came public, promoting Hadoop and they merged in 2019. MariaDB as a fork of MySQL and MySQL of course later acquired by Oracle. DataStax for Cassandra but it turns out that this is not always a safe destiny …

Coldago Research estimated that the entire open source industry will represent $27+ billion in 2021 and will pass the barrier of $35 billion in 2024.

Historically one of the roots came from the Unix – Linux transition. In fact, Unix was largely used and adopted but represented a certain price and the source code cost was significant, even prohibitive. Projects like Minix and Linux developed and studied at universities and research centers generated tons of users and adopters with many of them being contributors. Is it similar to a religion, probably not but for sure a philosophy. Red Hat, founded in 1993, has demonstrated that open source business could be big and ready for a long run, the company did its IPO in 1999 and had an annual run rate around $3 billion. The firm was acquired by IBM in 2019 for $34 billion, amazing right. Canonical, SUSE, Debian and a few others also show interesting development paths as companies or as communities.

Before that shift, software developments were essentially applications as system software meant cost and high costs. Also a startup didn’t buy software with the VC money they raised as it could be seen as suicide outside of their mission. All these contribute to the open source wave in all directions.

On the storage side, Linux invited students, research centers, communities and start-ups to develop system software and especially block storage approach and file system and others like object storage software. Thus we all know many storage software start-ups who leveraged Linux to offer such new storage models. We didn’t see lots of block storage as a whole but more open source operating system with block (SCSI based) storage included. This is bit different for file and object storage with plenty of offerings.

On the file storage side, the list is significant with disk file systems and distributed ones, the latter having multiple sub-segments as well.

Below is a pretty long list of OSS in the storage world.

The impact of open source is obvious both on commercial software but also on other emergent or small OSS footprint. By impact we mean disrupting established market positions with radical new approach. It is illustrated as well by commercial software embedding open source pieces or famous largely adopted open source product that prevent some initiatives to take off. Among all these scenario, we can list XFS, OpenZFS, Ceph and MinIO that shake commercial models and were even chosen by vendors that don’t need to develop themselves or sign any OEM deal with potential partners. Again as we said in the past many times, the Build, Buy or Partner model is also a reality in that world. To extend these examples, Ceph is recommended to be deployed with XFS disk file system for OSDs like OpenStack Swift.

As these last few examples show, obviously open source projets leverage other open source ones, commercial software similarly but we never saw an open source project leveraging a commercial one. This is a bit antinomic. This acts as a trigger to start a development of an open source project offering same functions.

OpenZFS is also used by Delphix, Oracle and in TrueNAS. MinIO is chosen by iXsystems embedded in TrueNAS, Datera, Humio, Robin.IO, McKesson, MapR (now HPE), Nutanix, Pavilion Data, Portworx (now Pure Storage), Qumulo, Splunk, Cisco, VMware or Ugloo to name a few. SoftIron leverages Ceph and build optimized tailored systems around it. The list is long … and we all have several examples in mind.

Open source players promote their solutions essentially around a community and enterprise editions, the difference being the support fee, the patches policies, features differences and of course final subscription fees. As we know, innovations come often from small agile players with a real difficulties to approach large customers and with doubt about their longevity. Choosing the OSS path is a way to be embedded and selected by larger providers or users directly, it implies some key questions around business models.

Another dimension of the impact on commercial software is related to the behaviors from universities or research centers. They prefer to increase budget to hardware and reduce software one by using open source. These entities have many skilled people, potentially time, to develop and extend open source project and contribute back to communities. They see, in that way to work, a positive and virtuous cycle, everyone feeding others. Thus they reach new levels of performance gaining capacity, computing power … finally a decision understandable under budget constraints and pressure. Ceph was started during Sage Weil thesis at UCSC sponsored by the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC), including Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). There is a lot of this, famous example is Lustre but also MarFS from LANL, GekkoFS from University of Mainz, Germany, associated with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center or BeeGFS, formerly FhGFS, developed by the Fraunhofer Center for High Performance Computing in Germany as well. Lustre was initiated by Peter Braam in 1999 at Carnegie Mellon University. Projects popped up everywhere.

Collaboration software as an extension to storage see similar behaviors. OwnCloud, an open source file sharing and collaboration software, is used and chosen by many universities and large education sites.

At the same time, choosing open source components or products as a wish of independence doesn’t provide any kind of life guarantee. Rremember examples such HDFS, GlusterFS, OpenIO, NexentaStor or Redcurrant. Some of them got acquired or disappeared and create issue for users but for sure opportunities for other players watching that space carefully. Some initiatives exist to secure software if some doubt about future appear on the table.

The SDS wave, a bit like the LMAP (Linux, MySQL, Apache web server and PHP) had a serious impact of commercial software as well as several open source players or solutions jumped into that generating a significant pricing erosion. This initiative, good for users, continues to reduce also differentiators among players and it became tougher to notice differences.

In addition, Internet giants played a major role in open source development. They have talent, large teams, time and money and can spend time developing software that fit perfectly their need. They also control communities acting in such way as they put seeds in many directions. The other reason is the difficulty to find commercial software that can scale to their need. In other words, a commercial software can scale to the large corporation needs but reaches some limits for a large internet player. Historically these organizations really redefined scalability objectives with new designs and approaches not found or possible with commercial software. We all have example in mind and in storage Google File System is a classic one or Haystack at Facebook. Also large vendors with internal projects that suddenly appear and donated as open source to boost community effort and try to trigger some market traction and partnerships, this is the case of Intel DAOS.

Open source is immediately associated with various licenses models and this is the complex aspect about source code as it continues to create difficulties for some people and entities that impact projects future. One about ZFS or even Java were well covered in the press at that time. We invite readers to check their preferred page for that or at least visit the Wikipedia one or this one with the full table on the appendix page.

Immediately associated with licenses are the communities, organizations or foundations and we can mention some of them here as the list is pretty long: Apache Software Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Free Software Foundation, FreeBSD Foundation, Mozilla Foundation or Linux Foundation … and again Wikipedia represents a good source to start.

Open source is a long story and is here to stay …