17 New York – October 12, 2012 I have written about this before (here and there), but it seems that there’s a massively important point that is being lost in the midst of all the discussions about Open Source Cloud Stacks being the only way to make the Cloud a true, hegemonical success. And that point is that it’s not. The only way to enable Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds to collaborate efficiently so that users can truly take advantage of this new era of computing is Open Standards. Only when these have been designed and broadly adopted (and Open Source will massively help here) will we be able to call the Cloud a revolution. And we’re obviously not the only ones pushing for Open Standards. Canonical is deeply involved in Open Source of course, but is a very strong advocate for Open Standards as well. They are after all one of the leading distribution in the Cloud (both as Host and Guest OS), have their own personal Cloud Storage Service (Ubuntu One) and strongly evangelize the Cloud Revolution. They are also part of the OCI (Open Cloud Initiative), whose goal is to design and promote a complete standard for Cloud: protocols, guidelines, reference architectures so that designing, building, maintaining a Cloud and interoperating with others is possible. Today, it is not that simple, because none of those things have been clearly defined and/or standardized. Canonical is pushing for that, and so are we. Scality’s approach when it comes to Storage Protocols is radically different from other Storage Vendors and in the same vein as Ubuntu’s. Instead of creating yet another proprietary interface, Scality has recently announced their Open Cloud Access (OCA) Strategy, at the core of which sits an abstraction layer that can be used to plug in any protocols. Today, this includes various REST protocols – Scality’s own documented REST APIs, RS2 (an Amazon S3 compatible API), CDMI – and even a file system mount. Scality intends to extend these access methods to OpenStack and NFS in the coming months. And we’ll be able to add more protocols as they come around and become standards. Again, opening up our storage systems to all protocols is our pledge to the Cloud Scality will be in San Diego next week, at the OpenStack Summit, showing our strong belief in Open Standards. While we do recognize Open Source as a strength that will foster a faster adoption of these new Cloud technologies, we strongly believe that Open Standards is the key for Cloud to really become Ubiquitous. I will be there, and so will Philippe Nicolas, Our director of Product Strategy, and Giorgio Regni, our CTO. Please contact us if you want to meet at the Summit and talk about all this. It is a great conversation to have in these times. And look out for this blog as well, as I will be posting some very cool news about Scality and about the Summit as well. Looking forward to seeing you in San Diego -Marc
