The annual Red Hat Forum did its Kuala Lumpur leg on Thursday. Now in its sixth year, the Red Hat Forum series kicked off in Mumbai, India, followed by 11 cities throughout the region.
 
Attended by Damien Wong, Vice President and General Manager for APAC, Chief Technologist Chris Wright, and Frederic Giron, Vice President, Research Director Serving CIOs, Forrester; Red Hat held a media discussion talking about open source. DSA took the chance to sit down with Damien and Chris to discuss all things storage and open source.
 
With much discussions focussing on open source, Chris was rather impressed that conversations went relatively well in terms of adoption. “We spent a long time selling open source as safe, worry free, not some fringe radical concept.” Chris said. “I didn’t see a huge amount of resistance to open source as a concept. In fact, [there is] a lot of interest in terms of using it as a way to lower costs, some concerns are around employee skill set for how do we manage this infrastructure.”
 
In ASEAN and APAC by extension, the knowledge is not quite there yet. Day in day out, we see a lot of reports on the DSA news desk talking about lack in skill sets and the need to outsource IT resources in many of the countries in these regions. Indeed, Chris is seeing a similar trend, where IT professionals understand their traditional infrastructure, they need more education on the new infrastructures.
 
In a way, this is progress. “The thing that I like is that the change in conversation was about “how would we use it how would we adopt it”, and not “are we out of our minds to think about it”.”
 
With around 5 years of experience with Red Hat in the ASEAN region, Damien added his observation. “There is a huge amount of growth and interest. Are we there yet? I don’t think so. I think there’s still a lot of opportunity for organisations to leverage the enterprise open source offering that are available. But at least [people are more inclined] to look at open source now.”
 
In many places around the world, open source is seen as a default, instead of a factor for consideration. Damien notes that while in ASEAN open source technologies are seen more as a viable alternative for companies, he believes this mindset is still a little behind, with other countries leaving this region behind.
 
“[In other countries], it’s just innovation, that happens to be open source, because a lot of innovation does come from an open source world.”
 
Damien sees there are some confusion in the region because while there may be some people who have dabbled in open source within the community, there could lead to misunderstandings with what is offered by enterprise open source technology providers.
 
“I tend to simplify it with the analogy of water. Water is great and free to utilise from rivers, but the moment you need to use it for something mission critical, and in these terms, if you need to drink the water, you will buy water from a provider. You may not necessarily need to buy premium water bottled from the Swiss alps.”
 
“That is what is important. The maturity of understanding and the acceptance of open source being the default way that innovation is happening, and enterprises need to be able to take advantage of that.”
 
While Chris was very pleased with discussions and conversations he had with end users, he was concern that innovation might be lacking in these regions. “Here there’s very little discretion to how developers can be involved with these upstream communities. A lot of conversation is around users safely consuming those upstream community projects.”
 
“I see very very little developer activity source from this region. I don’t know what’s behind that, but it’s not uncommon broadly speaking in APAC. I think there are some cultural barriers, language barriers, time zone differences, simple things that make it more challenging.”
 
Globally, the developer force is huge but with a heavy percentage of people in US and Europe, there are heavy uses of English. China and Japan are the dominant countries for open source developer network; unlike their western counterparts, Asia sees more variance in culture while the west might share perhaps more of a similar sense of culture.
 
With much celebrated success across many vendor platforms, Red Hat’s core offerings include Ceph and Gluster. According to Chris, they are “focused in bringing a commodity hardware based software powered solution to our customers.”
 
At a high level, Red Hat’s storage product portfolio is a software defined storage solution. By providing a set of APIs, users can get access to the underlying implementation of their storage, somewhat like a software defined storage controller – which is essentially what Ceph and Gluster are.
 
Gluster is in a nutshell, a distributed file system; while Ceph provides the capability to perform multiple forms of storage, including object storage, block storage and emerging file storage as well. The largest use case of Ceph on Red Hat’s radar, undoubtedly, would be OpenStack. With “a private cloud, a bunch of internal storage requirements, storing both VM images as well as any persistent data associated with the VM image”: it is not uncommon to see Ceph deployed as a distributed file storage substrate in the backend to manage storage requirements. Ceph and Gluster are both solutions focussed on scale out operations or redundancy.  
 
For many, OpenStack runs their primary storage workload and cloud native applications, and Ceph is native to OpenStack deployments. However, with still some lingering uncertainty surrounding some open source software, some companies tend to first deploy non mission critical workloads such as backup, archive and disaster recovery as a way of lowering cost without taking significant risks.
 
“Hardware has decreased significantly in terms of cost; it does make economic sense. For accessing hot data, that is still dominated by a lot of the incumbent players like the SAN players and the NAS players. The less upfront day to day, moment to moment data access - doesn’t necessarily have to be archival, but just recently less accessed data - it’s a good way and a safe place to wean yourself off.”
 
Damien continues to explain that storage costs can be optimised, with one of the strategy being the ability to tier the kind of storage you have and tie it to the kind of storage medium and platform. Which is an easy way for organisations to start optimising and doing a little bit more with it.
 
“Without open source, Google and Facebook wouldn’t exist today. The number of life changing technologies that people take for granted today will not exist without open source. You phone runs open source. You can’t imagine life without it at this point – it’s like water.”
 
Many traditional vendors including IBM, Dell and HPE are rolling out software defined offerings. It’s a different approach to a hardware focus sell merely years ago. “Which is good.” Damien commented. “They are acknowledging the demand in the market. How we are different is that we are agnostic. A lot of customers want choice; they don’t want to be moving from one lock in to another lock in, which kind of defeats the purpose.
 
In the coming 3 – 5 years, both Chris and Damien agrees that it’s plenty time for the open source scene to move forward. For RedHat, projects like Ceph is looking at how performance can change in hardware changing environment.
                               
“A big part of that would be containerised workloads, and from a storage point of view, there are a lot of interesting changes in hardware. This changes how you build the software. We talked so much about software, but we can’t forget that the underlying hardware is changing as well, so I think we will see some pretty interesting shifts in how storage is managed and delivered.”
 
To Red Hat, it won’t be surprising, and perhaps rather an obvious progress, that newer technologies are 100% sourced from open source.
 
“[Ultimately], the community decides – and the community includes developers and users. Users have a very strong voice in the process, which is unique.”