Seagate Joins OpenStack Foundation

Seagate Technology plc has become a corporate sponsor member of the OpenStack Foundation and Open Compute Project as part of a collaborative effort to partner with industry leaders to define and promote open source standards for cloud computing.

In a show of support, the company will help cloud builders to develop more scalable, customizable solutions using open platforms while reducing operating costs and providing benefits for consumers in the marketplace.

"Today’s explosion of data has forced cloud and big data customers to constantly look for ways to improve their storage infrastructure while lowering their total cost of ownership," said Scott Horn, Seagate’s VP of marketing. "As an industry pioneer, Seagate is excited to take the first of a number of industry changing steps in joining the open source community and leveraging our vast knowledge of storage and cloud optimized solutions to help foster the growth of cloud storage solutions."

By becoming official members of the OpenStack Foundation and Open Compute Project, Seagate will be joining a community of more than a 150 companies who are committed to building cloud architecture based on open source software and open standards including Rackspace, Red Hat, ATandT, Cisco, HP, and Dell. As a member of both organizations, Seagate will lend its expertise helping to optimize open hardware and software systems to take advantage of Seagate’s storage technology.

"We are excited to welcome Seagate to the OpenStack community," said Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation. "Their commitment to open cloud architecture and extensive storage expertise will benefit the whole community. We look forward to advancing the OpenStack mission with the support of Seagate."

"As customers venture into the cloud, key factors influencing buying decisions are choice of architecture and data portability because clients do not want to be locked into vendors or proprietary architectures," said Dan Iacono, IDC’s research director for storage in cloud solutions. "Seagate’s commitment to open communities, such as OpenStack and Open Compute, where people with similar philosophies about cloud architecture and open source software and hardware openly collaborate together to develop the best solution possible is only going to benefit all stakeholders, consumers and the industry in general."