SODA Foundation Gains New Investments, Expands Charter to Address Increasing Need for Data Autonomy

SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the SODA Foundation, previously OpenSDS, is expanding to include both open source software and standards to support the increasing need for data autonomy. SODA Foundation hosts an open source, unified and autonomous data management framework for data mobility from edge to core to cloud.

Premiere members include China Unicom, Fujitsu, Huawei, NTT Communications and Toyota Motor Corporation. Other members include China Construction Bank Fintech, Click2Cloud, GMO Pepabo, IIJ, MayaData, LinBit, Scality, Sony, Wipro and Yahoo Japan.

As part of the expansion, China Unicom is contributing its S3-compatible object storage YIG project to the SODA Foundation. YIG is the first in a line of projects that are joining the Foundation through the SODA Incubator program designed to foster an ecosystem of data and storage projects by supporting their growth through community outreach, collaboration and adoption.

The SODA Foundation today is also announcing the release of Faroe, the 1.0 version of its Open Data Framework software for cloud native and more. With support for block, file, and object storage, multi cloud data control, telemetry and resource management across heterogeneous storage, Faroe eliminates data silos, delivers integrated data management and enables seamless data mobility between on-premise and multicloud. Faroe also includes Container Storage Interface (CSI) storage plug-and-play as an experimental feature that simplifies Kubernetes storage management by abstracting CSI storage with SODA.

"Providing a neutral forum where both vendors and end users can contribute to building and integrating data management solutions for mobility and autonomy is our goal," said Steven Tan, chairman, SODA Foundation and VP & CTO of Cloud Solution at Futurewei. "These new investments and our expanding scope will help us support a growing community of open source data professionals who are pushing the envelope on these technologies." 

As data moves between the cloud, on premise and, increasingly, the Edge, data management is becoming more complex. And the increasing number of technologies supporting data management has created even more difficulty, including unintentional silos for data storage. During a time when data mobility and autonomy is more important than ever, it's critical that we simplify management, unify storage pools and provide a vendor neutral forum and platform that can accelerate innovation for end users. SODA Foundation seeks to reduce silos by integrating efforts across platforms for overall data mobility and autonomy. 

"With data privacy and treatment at the top of every company's priority list, the SODA Foundation serves an important role across industries," said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and GM of Projects at the Linux Foundation. "With new membership commitments, from vendors and end users alike, and an expanded scope to integrate software and standards, we believe this community will have an incredible impact in the coming months and years." 

For more information about the SODA Foundation, please visit:
https://sodafoundation.io/

Member Statements
China Construction Bank Fintech
"CCB Fintech is a financial technology subsidiary of China Construction Bank. We are always interested in the open source community contribution and it's our honor to join SODA. Glad to see its breakthroughs in multi-cloud environments and heterogeneous storage management. We will work with SODA to solve the container storage management challenges in cloud-native scenarios from now on. Hope to see more pioneers of the financial industry join SODA and join us to improve the innovation and development of open source technology in the global financial area," said CCB Fintech Technology Platform Department General Manager Zhan Shu.

China Unicom
"It's a great honor for China Unicom Wo Cloud to join the SODA community. We think the openness of the SODA project is great. In fact, we have been very active in this project in the previous year. We contributed the core code of our object storage project named YIG to the community. On Wo Cloud Summit 2019, we have witnessed the launch of SODA in China with many other partners. In the future, we will bring more friends into this community and make more innovations together," said Zhong Xin, CTO, China Unicom Wo Cloud.

Fujitsu
"FUJITSU LIMITED has been supporting society as an IT company. Over the years, we have been providing comprehensive storage solutions. Now, as we are transforming into a DX company, we are looking to support our customers to transform their business model and to help them to create new businesses by modernizing systems and leveraging cloud native technologies. SODA is a powerful solution for simplifying storage management that has been very complex for many years, and enabling ties to the cloud. FUJITSU believes that SODA will accelerate the accomplishment of its mission and has been contributing to the ecosystem since OpenSDS, the direct predecessor of SODA," said Shinya Hamano, manager, development department, infrastructure software division, Fujitsu. 

IBM
"Managing the data coming from heterogeneous sources and formats is an interesting problem along with the regulatory requirements. SODA foundation attempts to address these challenges in an open manner which would help companies build reliable AI enabled solutions," said Rakesh Jain, SODA Foundation board member and Researcher & Architect at IBM Corporation.

NTT Communications
"Storage silos in our services make a barrier among customers and the services. The barriers like individual storage software/API have hindered not only us from managing our services, but also customers from utilizing their data across the services. We're expecting SODA to help service providers and customers overcome the barrier by using an open data management platform," said Kei Kusunoki, Storage Architect, Innovation Center, NTT Communications. 

Scality
"Scality supports SODA Foundation because we share the belief that data proliferation has a huge impact on data management challenges. Organizations are increasingly leveraging the benefits of hybrid cloud, which brings new challenges that demand proven solutions to store, govern and orchestrate massive volumes of data across geographies and clouds. We believe that collaborating with the open source community is vitally important as the velocity of change demands faster, better delivery of solutions," said Paul Speciale, Chief Product Officer, Scality.

Sony
"As a cold data archive system provider, we are excited about joining the SODA. We have just released the third generation of Optical Disc Archive, and we believe that integrating it into the SODA system will provide more diverse and rich value to this community and its customers. We are looking forward to collaborating with other SODA members to create a full data lifecycle management platform in the aim of solving data/storage management challenges," said Mikio Kita, VP, Sony Corporation, Senior General Manager of Media Solution Business Div. Sony Imaging Products & Solutions Inc.

Toyota Motor Corporation
"Connected vehicles on a street would generate significant volume of data, and they are widely spread in many locations. Managing those data and data storage is going to be a key challenge for us to get a variety of benefits from those data," said Kenichi Murata, Project General Manager of Connected Strategy, Toyota Motor Corporation. "We expect that SODA Foundation would be the best place to seek the solution of our future issues, and we would be happy to collaborate in the Foundation with many people who have the same issues."

Wipro
"Wipro is proud of its association with the SODA foundation. Our passion for latest technology, and access to a diverse ecosystem to deliver value to our customers has been the foundation for Wipro's EngineeringNXT offerings. Driven by our deep domain expertise in Data management and storage  across industries, Wipro understands and supports the need for open standards in data management for advanced storage solutions. Being part of the SODA foundation will not only enable us to innovate in this space and deliver cloud-and-vendor agnostic solutions for hybrid cloud data management, but also give us a platform to connect and collaborate with like-minded members for thought leadership and industry best practices," said Supriyo Das, Vice President, Industrial & Engineering Services (I&ES)

Yahoo Japan
"As our services continue to grow, data is getting bigger day by day. We are facing the challenge of managing storage systems more efficiently. We strongly endorse the purpose of SODA to provide a standardized API between multiple storage backends and multiple cloud systems. We believe that SODA can help reduce storage complexity," said Yusuke Sato, Storage Architect, Yahoo! JAPAN.

About the Linux Foundation
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