back to article Who'll do a Red Hat on open-source storage?

Are we heading for a Linux moment in the storage world where an open-source "product" truly breaks out and causes the major vendors a headache? I’ve had this conversation a few times recently with both vendors and end users - and the general feeling is that we are pretty close to it. What is needed is for someone to do a Red …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yes, package up other people's efforts made for free

    and then sell it at a profit.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Yes, package up other people's efforts made for free

      If they didn't want that to happen, they shouldn't have made their work free and open source.

      Anyway, it's the services and support which are charged for, not the software.

      I love it when die hard FOSS enthusiasts complain about people making money from FOSS, yet still, somehow, want the world to use Linux.

      1. dajames
        Unhappy

        Re: Yes, package up other people's efforts made for free

        If they didn't want that to happen, they shouldn't have made their work free and open source.

        Consider two people who each work hard and produce a useful piece of software. One sells his program for money, the other gives it away for nothing.

        Why do you think it should be OK to copy the work of the latter and pass it off as your own, but (apparently) not that of the former?

        If anything, the altruism of the latter programmer should be rewarded by greater protection from copying - he is not growing fat on the profits of his labours, and so can less easily afford to protect his work.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Yes, package up other people's efforts made for free

          Are you saying that Red Hat pass off Linux as their own work? This is not what's happening, others are using FOSS to make money by selling the services and support required to make the software useful to people who need the whole package.

          Anyway, I repeat: If you don't want people to use your software for free, don't make it free and open source. I'm not making a value judgment, it's just common sense.

        2. VWDan
          WTF?

          Re: Yes, package up other people's efforts made for free

          Firstly, this has nothing to do with "passing off" - a completely different legal scenario that sees a third party directly pretend that they created something without prior permission.

          Secondly, it's almost as though you know absolutely nothing about software licensing - open source, or otherwise. It's entirely possible to release open source software that directly forbids commercial use, and that's fine. It's equally possible to release open source software that allows commercial use - which is where things like this post come in.

          So put that knee back down and get a grip.

          1. Paul A. Clayton

            See the Open Source Definition

            "It's entirely possible to release open source software that directly forbids commercial use"

            No. That would violate the Open Source Definition: http://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor

            (Prohibiting selling the software would be a violation of the first point in the definition: http://opensource.org/osd#free-redistribution )

            1. VWDan
              Thumb Down

              Re: See the Open Source Definition

              No. It would violate one single philosophical definition of the universal term Open Source. I'm pretty certain that opensource.org don't own the term.

              If I release the source code of my application along with a license that forbids commercial use it doesn't somehow become closed source, does it?

    2. Platypus

      Re: Yes, package up other people's efforts made for free

      I'm not going to get into the general philosophy or practice of open-source business models, but I will point out that "other people's efforts" doesn't really apply here. All of the projects that have any chance of meeting Chris's description are funded by someone. Red Hat is spending millions on GlusterFS development. Ceph has Inktank, Lustre has Intel (plus DDN and Xyratex), OrangeFS has Omnibond, etc. Nexenta might be the exception, as most of what they're selling is code developed at Sun, but at least it seems like Oracle isn't pursuing that market themselves. No authors are getting ripped off here.

      Do you know who most of those projects *are* taking advantage of? The US taxpayer, whose money has been used to provide development resources and/or publicity for all of Ceph/Lustre/OrangeFS. Without that unwitting and unwilling support, none of those projects would be where they are now. I for one am glad that they are, even though I compete with them, and I consider it a good use of government research dollars, but someone with more of a small-government attitude than I have might find cause for complaint there. The transition from public sector to private is tricky, and one could well argue that too much government money has gone into Lustre pockets particularly.

  2. Nate Amsden

    you know that red hat has a storage product right?

    it sucks but they have one... along the lines of ceph.

    their marketeers are quick to point out you can replace your enterprise system with it, but you can't.

    I attended a web conference on the product a few months ago, and an in person conference that covered it in December and was pretty embarrassed by what I saw.

    Nexenta has a ways to go as well, if you breathe on it wrong it goes whacky. just recently I dismantled my Nexenta cluster because the thing is more reliable without clustering than with clustering.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: you know that red hat has a storage product right?

      Similarly our redhat cluster is more stable with clustering switched off - the high availability parts are the least reliable part of the whole system.

      1. Marc Glisse

        Re: you know that red hat has a storage product right?

        At least it isn't at the same level as btrfs on linux (no clustering there) where you are better off disabling mirrors because errors in a single disk can bring the system down... (seen with versions as recent as 3.6.x, got rid of it since then)

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  4. FreeTard

    Object storage?

    Caringo comes to mind.

  5. msage

    Gluster

    Surely this is why RH bought Gluster? I agree with the article and I think it may well be RH again. I used gluster in the past to setup a multi TB cloud archive for modelling data and it worked great, although RH support was certainly lacking then, I am sure it will / has improved.

  6. Platypus
    Pint

    Funny story

    I used to joke about this with AB Periasamy, founder of Gluster. He was using the line about Gluster (the company) becoming the "Red Hat of storage". I disagreed, saying that Red Hat should be the Red Hat of storage. Turns out we were both kind of right. ;)

    But seriously, folks, it is kind of weird that you got through this article without even mentioning GlusterFS a.k.a. Red Hat Storage. Whatever you might think of our ability to "cause the major vendors a headache" that's clearly the intent and there's a lot of resources behind it. You even mention the company, but not the product. If I were only a tiny bit more cynical, I might think it was a deliberate snub posted for the sole purpose of giving a rival more exposure.

    Disclaimer: in case it's not clear from the context, I'm a GlusterFS developer.

  7. John Sanders
    Linux

    Gluster is not bad but...

    "Disclaimer: in case it's not clear from the context, I'm a GlusterFS developer."

    Dear Gluster developer, are you working towards fixing that annoying GlusterFS behaviour of randomly locking nodes when writing millions of small files to the file-system per day? (IE: small files = emails)

    I do not think Gluster is going to take off for long if that is not fixed.

    1. Platypus
      WTF?

      Re: Gluster is not bad but...

      There are many better places to discuss that, John - ideally a bug report, but also the mailing list, IRC, etc. The point *here* is that, even if some people misuse it or even if it actually is technically deficient in some way, GlusterFS has proven useful enough to enough people that it belongs in this conversation. It's not like other storage products don't have bugs and missing features too, and people who might say those preclude serious consideration. How does single-digit IOPS sound to you? Or corrupting data? I've hit both of those in other projects, without even trying, but I know those other projects can fix their bugs just as we can fix ours. The question is not which project *deserves* to become the Red Hat of open-source storage based on its current state (which we can discuss elsewhere), but which *is likely to* as it progresses over the next few years, and in that context it seems remiss not to mention Red Hat themselves.

  8. Stryker007
    Thumb Up

    Thanks, I'll check GlusterFS out :-)

  9. Infernoz Bronze badge
    Coat

    FreeNAS 8 does me fine for LAN use.

    FreeNAS 8 (a custom FreeBSD 8 build with ZFS etc.) works pretty well for non-clustered use, it supports massive volumes, dataset and file sizes, also volume extension, scheduled replications, and the usual NAS servers.

    I personally would not trust storage not using ZFS, even clustered storage, because this may have the same consistency problems as RAID1.

    It maybe that a virtual ZFS filesystem could be layered on top of multiple slave iSCSi ZFS instances, and implement clusters with RAIDZn and volume extension.

    Just an idea.

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