SolidFire is a solid (and fiery) open-source company, and was at the recent Red Hat Summit. I had a chance to ask Cloud Solutions Architect Aaron Delp (pictured below) some questions about what’s going on at the company.
Roger: So, what is the future of open source? More complex environments? Bigger customers? More cloud?
Aaron: The future of Open Source Software, or OSS, is the abstraction of hardware. By abstracting away hardware into manageable pools of dynamic resources we are actually creating an environment that is less complex to operate.
OSS is making great efforts to simplify this software abstraction into more manageable projects. Examples of this from the Red Hat Summit are Project Atomic, the newly announced lightweight operating system built for containers, combined with an LXC container project such as Docker running on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) such as OpenShift.
The trend towards simplification through application containers also is seeing increased traction in OpenStack environments as well. By creating an abstracted infrastructure that is easier to maintain, greater scalability can be achieved, leading to larger customer environments and a greater adoption of cloud computing as a whole.
Roger: How critical is the real-time aspect of modern IT? How quickly is it growing?
Aaron: When I think real-time in regards to modern IT, I think of IT infrastructures and the requirement to become more agile in response to customer needs and lines of business demands.
The ability to abstract away physical data center components into flexible pools of dynamic resources will be critical going forward. Customers are demanding an agile Infrastructure. This is why we are seeing such an accelerated adoption of Open Source Software to provide abstraction and service layers.
Open Source Software adoption is growing faster now than any point in the history of our industry. Because of this, traditional IT hardware vendors will be required to develop integrations between Open Source Software and their products to remain relevant as this industry continues to grow.
Roger: How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions? How important is the term Big Data to you?
Aaron: Big Data is the future of analytics and the gateway to providing solutions tuned to customer needs in the fastest way possible. As this industry matures, we will see a shift in the way organizations interact with customers.
The ability to fine tune interactions with customers will be critical to remain competitive and the possibilities here are seemingly endless.