Why Hardware Must Speak Software and What It Looks Like in the Open Source World – RTInsights

Whether challenges concern security, observability, access to data, data flow, or multicloud, hardware must pay attention to the Open Source world.

Data is value. But merely having usabledata doesnt necessarily translate into taking full advantage of it.

The key question that enterprises areasking is, how can we tap datas available but inaccessible potential,furthering our customers goals and boosting revenues? And for answers,theyre increasingly turning to open source solutions.

Leading companies are evaluating andmaturing open architecturesintegratedcollections of composable compute, networking, and storage resources. Thescalable hardware infrastructures enable processes for continuous integrationand development of software. Far from a black box, open source software and,increasingly, hardware offer better visibility and control for everyone. Theupshot: democratizingthe tech industry by removingbarriers that stand in the way of collaboration.

See also: Top Open Source Tools for Deep Learning

An IDCTechScape study found thatmost of the important emerging technologies are partially or fully made up ofopen source components, which makes a bold statement about where the industry goesin the future.

The benefits are significant:

The company I work for, SeagateTechnologya global leader providing data storage solutions for over 40 yearsbelongsin the hardware camp.

And yet, for the same reasons thatinnovation is at home in the open source world, we go beyond that: We want tobe fluent in software, and we enable innovations happening in software.

For several years, Seagate has sponsoredsoftware-centric consortia and foundations like The Linux Foundation andUniversity of Santa Cruzs Center for Research in Open Source Software, as wellas open source hardware foundations such as RISC-V and OpenTitan. Wereoptimizing our systems for data increasingly stored as objects.

Whats a hardware company doing in thesoftware world? Anything that happens in software reverberates in hardwareandvice versa. Hardware is the yin to softwares yang. Each has toinnovate to keep up with the others demands. The flow of data requiressoftware and hardware to enable itin tandem. Experience designing hardware offersinsights into how data should be processed. And lessons from the software worldshould inform hardware design.

The problems that open source tacklesare the same that data storage solutions take on. Consider several challengingareas: the rise of the multicloud, data flow, access to data, observability,and security.

Multicloud: As many enterprises shift from public cloud tomulticloud, they still expect the features of public cloud in hybrid clouds.Open source projectslike Apache Hadoop and Ceph, which enable scale-outstorageinnovate to power private clouds with compute and storage deployment.

How can hardware play a role? By enabling scale-out software ecosystems for privatecloud with workload-optimized clusters. If the application needs lower latency,an all-flash-array powered by SSDs is the right solution. If the private cloudrequires massive storage, the hardware architecture allows configurabledisaggregated building blocks.

Data Flow Issues: Given the rise of the edge, the IoT, and other tech, datais exploding from edge to core. In 2025 the datasphere will reach 175ZB. Whereand how to store and process all this data? Open source software offersbuilding blocks that allow infrastructure architects to developapplication-optimized solutions. Examples include solutions that allow streamingof data (e.g., Kafka), those that inject the data for analysis (e.g., Hive),and those storing data in OS-powered databases (e.g., Redis).

What does this mean for hardware? Which building blocks are combined to ingest desirabledata, at what rate, and what tools are used for analysis? All this has abearing on how the compute and storage components are configured. To facilitatean organic growth of cloud infrastructure, a compossible and disaggregatedapproach will yield an efficiency of resources (as opposed to a hyperconvergedarchitecture that leaves valuable resources stranded).

Access to Data: As data needs increase exponentially, the access to datagrows more important. As the capacity on disks increases to provide the densityneeded given the demand, so does the need for greater speed of reading andwriting the datawhile keeping the overall costs down.

Hows hardware helping? Researchers are innovating the NAND technology in orderto reduce cost while allowing the same level of latency and bandwidth. Technologieslike the dual actuator are providing higher IOPS to the higher-capacitydevices. This provides options to architects, enabling them to configuresystems that match the needs of various applications.

Observability: Anotheraspect of software-hardware integration isthe need for information about the system. The software megatrend is toorchestrate and then manage the multicloud infrastructure autonomously.Container orchestration ecosystems such as Kubernetes (powered to declareinfrastructure-as-code) integrate with mature open source tools such asPrometheus to innovate autonomous manageability.

And in thehardware world? Observabilityof factors such as temperature and vibration means information that can drivevalue. Hardware innovations can drive better data telemetry (observablemetrics) by creating easy-to-use tools for AI to reduce manual interventionsand preempt irregularities. Enterprise devices can expose open logs thatprovide much more granular information. Field Accessible Reliability Metrics isone such log that gives insight into the hard drive health.

Security: With regulations like GDPR and the California ConsumerPrivacy Act, needs grow for better management of the provenance, flow, compute,and storage of data. This creates an affinity with open source solutionsbecause the openness of the source promotes trust.

How does this show up in hardware? Take RISC-V. Its an open instruction set for electronicsfocused on low cost, low power, and high security, which allows companies toleverage and develop electronics architectures faster through a shared model.

There you have it: Whether challengesconcern security, observability, access to data, data flow, or multicloud,hardware must pay attention to the software world.

Because when it comes to the businessof data, hardware and software are in it together.

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Why Hardware Must Speak Software and What It Looks Like in the Open Source World - RTInsights