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Open-Ended Upside

OpenStack and Kinetic: Next-Generation Datacenter Storage Starts Now
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For those waiting for the other shoe to drop, there are a couple of drawbacks today. First, Seagate Kinetic-ready drives are not available yet. Seagate expects to begin rolling them out in mid-2014, with widespread availability later in the year. Second, there are too few management tools available today. This is partly why those who back OpenStack are so fervently communicating about it to the channel and their customer bases. Over the next several months, more solution providers and ISVs need to become involved and help develop a market in which the OpenStack transformation can take hold.

Developers and VARs will add particular value in vertical markets. These groups need special attention on application performance, meeting SLAs, and adhering to regulatory mandates. Perhaps most importantly, solution providers such as Silicon Mechanics and Cloudscaling will need to be up to speed on all facets of OpenStack so that they can walk customers through the entire value sequence in selecting a cloud platform: assessment, design, deployment, operation, management, and support. Not least of all, a channel partner should be able to guide enterprises through migrating existing applications into cloud readiness. None of this is obvious or easy. Demand from the enterprise world may well outstrip available expertise during the short-term.

“OpenStack is like the Linux kernel,” says Cloudscaling’s Mohamed. “It’s a box of parts, not a solution. CIOs want to get moving quickly, but they realize that they don’t have the technical expertise on staff to get there. Also, they don’t want to hire a consultant to engineer a one-off solution that they’ll end up maintaining by themselves in perpetuity. So they look to companies like Cloudscaling and our Open Cloud System as a way to deploy an AWS-compatible hybrid cloud quickly, one that’s built on OpenStack and is currently in production in multiple places. They get the security of an ecosystem and community of users.”

OpenStack and the Seagate Kinetic platform address many of the key pain points in today’s datacenter markets: storage scaling, tight capex budgets, energy costs, and the need for greater data reliability. At first glance, some might look at this transition and see no need. After all, it’s just the same drive with a new interface. Why go through the hassle and expense of taking on a new storage paradigm? But the answers are clear and persuasive. OpenStack and Kinetic will change datacenter storage, and the sooner organizations embrace this change, the greater their advantage and the sooner their ROI break-even will turn into improved bottom lines.