New Vault Conference to Promote Open Source Cloud Storage

The Linux Foundation thinks open source storage deserves a conference all its own, and has announced plans to host an event toward that end in March 2015 in the form of a new conference called Vault.

The Linux Foundation, a non-profit consortium that promotes Linux and open source software, announced Vault on Thursday. The purpose of the conference, according to the group, is to help guide the direction of open source storage development as organizations increasingly move data to the cloud, creating new types of security and privacy challenges.

"90% of the world's data has been created in the last few years and most of that data is being stored and accessed via a Linux-based system," said Linux Foundation Chief Marketing Officer Amanda McPherson. "Now is the ideal time to bring the open source community together in this new forum, Vault, to collaborate on new methods of improving capacity, efficiency and security to manage the huge data volumes envisioned in the coming years. By bringing together the leading minds of Linux file systems and storage and our members who are pushing the limits of what is possible, Vault should expand the state of the art in Linux."

Facebook, IBM (IBM), NetApp (NTAP), Omnibond, Red Hat (RHT), SanDisk, Seagate and SUSE have already signed on as founding members of Vault, which will take place March 11-12 in Boston. It will be co-located with the Linux Storage, Filesystem and Memory Management Summit, an invite-only event.

The Linux Foundation said it hopes Vault will provide a place "where companies leading development" in the realm of open source, next-generation storage technologies "can network with users and developers to advance computing."