By switching to an open-source storage infrastructure, businesses can avoid the problems associated with using commercial storage providers. Data storage is a crucial and delicate component of organizational infrastructure. Reliable storage requirements are necessary even though crashed applications can be easily restarted and lost network packets retransmitted. For a variety of reasons, the majority of businesses rely on commercial solutions for their storage needs. Commercial options are helpful, but if you rely on one vendor for your storage needs, you will be at their mercy in terms of support quality, price adjustments, and upgrades.
Open-Source Storage: What Is It and Why Is It Gaining Popularity?
Storage solutions that have been released to the public and are available for use, distribution, and modification are referred to as open-source storage. The goal of open-source software development is to promote creativity, openness, and teamwork. This enables users to audit codes, adjust as needed, correct bugs, and enhance code developments to meet their unique storage requirements.
The solutions offer a number of benefits. As an example, it has an engaged community of contributors who work together to expand and maintain it in order to address emerging problems. Additionally, this storage option improves compatibility. Keep in mind that open-source tools and storage solutions are relatively similar.
But there are a number of reasons why open-source storage options are becoming more and more well-liked. Open-source storage solutions offer fair pricing and unlimited control over your data storage, which is probably why more businesses are turning to them for their storage requirements. Additionally, the majority of its providers have good scalability.
These solutions can also be used for file and print services, array clustering, and encryption, among other business needs. The majority of businesses also appreciate that open-source storage options can be supported on their servers or in the cloud. This can be used by businesses to create infrastructure storage, object storage, cloud storage, storage area networks, and network-attached storage.
Attached Storage over a Network (NAS)
Networks are used to access NAS instead of direct computer connections. Because they have processors and operating systems, network-attached storage solutions can securely run applications and share files with authorized users. NAS devices can be accessed by numerous users, computers, and mobile devices. NAS-compatible open-source storage options include:
- Openfiler – supports both NAS and SAN
- OpenMediaVault – has multiple services, including BitTorrent clients, DAAP media server, and RSync.
- FreeNAS – Linux-based option
Object Storage
Large amounts of unstructured data are best stored in object storage. Facebook, which stores images, Dropbox, which stores files, and Spotify, which stores music, are a few examples of frequently used object storage. Object storage is supported by the following open-source storage options:
- Gateway for Ceph object storage
- Large amounts of unstructured data are best managed with OpenIO.
Area Network for Storage (SAN)
A storage area network links servers and several shared storage pools via a fast computer network. Every server provides block-level data storage and has direct access to shared storage. On the other hand, file-level access can be created on SAN by building files. The following open-source storage options work with SANs:
- Openfiler – offers a number of features that facilitate NAS and SAN
- Several storage pools, including filesystem pools, NAS pools, directory pools, and logical volume pools, are supported by the Linux-based Libvirt Storage Management software.
The Advantages of Open Source Storage
More organizations are increasingly adopting open-source storage solutions because of the following benefits:
- Cost-effective: licensing open-source storage apps is usually free. Organizations can, however, charge for improvements or additions to open-source software. The primary advantage of open-source users, particularly those with limited resources, is cost savings.
- Total privacy and control: Open-source storage solutions provide greater control and privacy than commercial apps. Commercial storage solutions connect businesses to cloud storage, requiring the organization to have internet access to access stored data. This also has implications for data privacy. Open-source solutions help businesses avoid vendor lock-in, allowing them to enjoy maximum customization that cloud or commercial software cannot provide.
- Excellent support: The open-source community encourages unlimited creativity and assistance. Members frequently share solutions that enable others to build on their applications. Organizations can take advantage of the reasonable support provided by open-source community members for free via online forums.
- Unrivaled scalability: solutions such as HPCC, Ceph, Lustre, ZFS, Apache Hadoop, and others provide excellent scalability.
Adoption Strategies for Open-Source Storage
While the solutions are cost-effective, you should understand the difference between downloading projects for free, trying them out on developer machines, and relying on them to power crucial applications with stringent stability and security requirements.
As a result, enterprises transitioning to open-source storage solutions must possess extensive technical knowledge and resources in order to develop solutions that support such mission-critical applications. This could be complicated for organizations. Enterprises must also deal with flexibility. Unfortunately, organizations can’t be guaranteed unlimited flexibility with open-source technologies.
Even though organizations have the capability and talents to build, design, and support customized storage solutions, they should ensure that these solutions integrate with organizations’ hardware platforms.
Providing Cybersecurity
Organizations considering open-source storage solutions should take cyber resilience prospects into account, given the recent spike in cyberattacks. The fundamentals of data management and long-term storage solutions remain the same. As a result, when purchasing solutions, efficiency, throughput, resilience, and performance continue to be crucial factors.
If an organization intends to use open-source storage solutions, it should confirm that those solutions work in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The solution should also enable scalability and agility.
Available Open-Source Storage Solutions
Even though there is still hope for open-source storage solutions, you should be aware of some of the top options. They consist of:
- OpenStack is an operating system for cloud computing that manages sizable amounts of networking resources in its data center. Managing stored data is made simple for administrators by the platform’s dashboard.
- Ceph is a distributed object storage system that offers excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. Businesses may construct cost-effective storage systems with a variety of commodity hardware.
- Free NAS software like RockStor is an excellent substitute for public cloud storage. The costs and hazards associated with using public cloud storage are removed with RockStor. For individuals without a lot of IT experience, small and medium-sized enterprises, and home users are the best candidates for this option.
- Giant corporations such as EMC, Cisco, NetApp, Toshiba, and Red Hat support kinetic open storage. Distributed file systems and unstructured data are used by the majority of users of kinetic storage solutions.
Organizations can control data storage with the flexibility and agility that open-source storage solutions provide. In addition to reasonable costs, the open-source community offers businesses that need to create, maintain, and enhance their storage solutions a wealth of assistance.
