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The role of open source in enterprise storage solutions

Open Source Adoption

Article from ADMIN 29/2015

By Swapnil Bhartiya

We talk with Nithya Ruff about open source adoption and why having an open source office is important to coordinate efforts across all business units.

Nithya Ruff is the Director of the Open Source Strategy Office at SanDisk. The company is becoming increasingly active in the Linux community. I sat down with Nithya at LinuxCon Seattle to learn more about SanDisk and its involvement with open source projects and communities.

Swapnil Bhartiya: How much have things progressed in a year in terms of Linux and open source at SanDisk?

Nithya Ruff: One year of focused Open Source Office effort has been tremendously positive for the company. I really advocate having an open source office because it allows companies to coordinate the efforts across all of the business units, across legal marketing, engineering, strategy, etc.

In fact, there are a few highlights for this year that I can call out: We have had more speakers than we have ever had in external events like LinuxCon, All Things Open, OpenStack, etc. So, it has been positive as it allowed us to show what SanDisk is doing in open source and the commitment that we have to open source externally.

Second, we have really increased the amount of blogging and social media interaction we are doing from an open source perspective, and that really has been positive as well.

And, third, the company continues to be very involved in the Ceph project. We have done a tremendous number of contributions and are in the top 10 list of contributors. We are also working with the Ceph community to get on the board of Ceph, for example, so that we actually contribute our views from customers – our view as a flash vendor – to that project.

We have also been maintaining the SCST SCSI project, and we also open sourced an Android storage library, which allows application developers to use external storage such as SD cards or microSD cards more effectively.

We also recently launched a sub-project in the Linux Foundation, which is Mobile Embedded Linux Storage, so that we can coordinate

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