ownCloud Promotes Scalability, Efficiency of Open Source Private Cloud

ownCloud, the open source platform for deploying cloud services using internal enterprise infrastructure, said it can scale just as well as traditional public cloud environments, while keeping data much more private. That's the company's conclusion based on testing results of ownCloud running on Red Hat (RHT) Storage, which are on display at this week's Red Hat Summit.

ownCloud's value proposition is to allow enterprises to leverage the convenience and flexibility of the cloud without migrating their data to third-party infrastructure. Instead, the platform, which is available in a community-supported open source edition as well as a value-added commercial version called ownCloud Enterprise, provides a cloud service for storing and syncing data that runs entirely on a company's own servers and storage devices.

Data privacy and security have always been at the center of ownCloud's pitch, but now, ownCloud said it beats public cloud services when it comes to cost and performance efficiency, too. This week, the company reported on tests running ownCloud 6 Enterprise Edition on Red Hat Storage:

The company also said its product delivers cost benefits by allowing enterprises to combine application servers and storage servers into a single device, rather than separating them as they would in a public-cloud environment: "The configuration used illustrates a 2x total cost of ownership (TCO) improvement by converging the application server and storage server tiers onto the same servers, compared to traditional solutions with separate storage server appliances."

This week's Red Hat Summit, where ownCloud is hosting a booth as a Red Hat Storage Partner, provides an obvious setting for promoting the scalability of ownCloud in conjunction with Red Hat Storage, since both platforms are rooted centrally in the open source ecosystem.  The Red Hat Storage environment that ownCloud chose for highlighting the scalability of its platform is certainly not the only configuration that ownCloud supports, but it is a popular one that underscores ownCloud's investment in disrupting traditional cloud storage paradigms.