Over the last few weeks I have been working with several of our international clients in the energy, defense, and media sectors to help them solve some of their big data cost issues. Our customers are using RedHat throughout their enterprises and are looking for affordable big storage solutions.
One of our customers sent us a link a few weeks ago about the updates to XFS and how it is going to be included in the next release of RedHat as a supported file system. The video link below of Dave Chiner giving a talk provides a great overview of how the improved XFS can help our clients manage their large storage requirements.
Additionally, Redhat’s management is aggressively pushing storage development as Jim Whitehurst – RedHat CEO – has said recently:
“Open source is ultimately where all companies are heading,” Whitehurst stated flatly.
“…So far at Red Hat, my focus as been squarely on our datacenter business, trying to execute really well on our core offerings. I think the future is in the cloud and big data. Our acquisition of Gluster last year and the work we have done around these storage offerings gives us a huge opportunity — an opportunity that I think could actually be bigger than the Linux business.”
Our customers tell us that they need a way of controlling their storage costs while maintaining their high availability storage equipment. After all, it was our NetApp support customers that helped us develop our SimplStor product line because they knew that we could provide them with enterprise level service and support for their hardware.
Yesterday I visited a large defense contractor and in addition to the NetApp support he was getting quotes on he wanted to know if our SimplStor products could help him with his large data archiving project without blowing his budget. It was an interesting conversation, and as with so many of our customers there was a recognition that Enterprise hardware support and Enterprise RedHat with a great file system can provide an affordable high availability storage solution.
