Dell EMC is joining the OpenSDS Project, a Linux Foundation Collaborative project. To mark its commitment to the project, Dell EMC is contributing CoprHD SouthBound SDK (SB SDK) to the OpenSDS project. The SB SDK allows developers to build drivers and other tools with the assurance that they will be compatible with a wide variety of enterprise-class storage products.

The OpenSDS Project is one of the many open source projects that are part of the foundation’s collaborative projects. Lately, the foundation has become a de facto body for companies to collaborate on their projects. I once asked Sam Ramji, the then CEO of Cloud Foundry (one of the largest Collaborative projects), about the benefits that projects get by being part of the foundation and he said that projects benefit from the huge community that the foundation has created.

Almost all big and small tech companies, including Microsoft, are members of the Linux Foundation. Which makes it very easy to cross-pollinate ideas and collaborate with companies in ways that would not be possible in isolation.

Projects benefit from the governance and management experience that they borrow from the foundation, they benefit from shared marketing, and most of all they benefit through Linux Foundation events that bring different industries under the same roof. This year Open Networking Summit became a Linux Foundation event and even the Apache Software Foundation now organizes its ApacheCon in conjunction with the Linux Foundation events.

I once asked Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin about this massive growth and influence and he said, “It’s great to be on the right side of history.”

The formation of the OpenSDS community is an industry response to address software-defined storage integration challenges with the goal of driving enterprise adoption of open standards. It’s supported by storage users and vendors, including Huawei, Fujitsu, HDS, Vodafone and Oregon State University.

Thanks to the Linux Foundation umbrella, which houses many critical open source projects in the cloud and networking space, OpenSDS is now looking at collaborating with other upstream open source communities such as Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Docker, OpenStack, and Open Container Initiative.

The project expects an initial prototype available in Q2 2017 with a Beta release by Q3 2017. According to the project page, “The initial participants expect OpenSDS will leverage open source technologies, such as Cinder and Manila from the OpenStack community, to best enable support across a wide range of cloud storage solutions.”

“Dell EMC is a welcome addition to the OpenSDS Project and we look forward to its input,” said Cameron Bahar, Senior Vice President and Global Chief Technology Officer of storage at Huawei, in a press release. “We invite other vendors and enterprise customers to follow Dell EMC’s lead, and to join us in creating an open storage controller solution across cloud, containerized, virtualized and other environments, and make storage-as-a-service a reality.”