Samsung to co-develop memory software with Red Hat

Samsung Electronics will co-develop memory software with U.S. software company Red Hat, the electronics maker said Wednesday.

Red Hat Senior Vice President Marjet Andriesse, left, and Samsung Electronics Executive Vice President Bae Yong-cheol pose for a photo during a signing ceremony for memory software development collaboration, on May 13. [SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS]

Samsung Electronics will co-develop memory software with U.S. software company Red Hat, the electronics maker said Wednesday.

The goal is to develop open-source software for existing and emerging memory and data storage hardware products through extensive collaboration, said the companies.

Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Red Hat is a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM that sells open-source software services for enterprises.

Open-source software is computer software which anyone can access to modify its source code. Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is a commercial operating system based on open-source software Linux, is one example.

"Samsung and Red Hat will make a concerted effort to define and standardize memory software solutions that embrace evolving server and memory hardware, while building a more robust memory ecosystem," said Bae Yong-cheol, executive vice president and head of the memory application engineering team at Samsung Electronics.

The companies explained that the fast increase in data volume drove up demand for advanced memory hardware, which requires more sophisticated software.

"In the upcoming data-centric era, the integration of memory-centric hardware and software architectures will become increasingly essential," said Marjet Andriesse, senior vice president and head of Red Hat Asia Pacific, “and for this purpose, Red Hat is happy to participate in the joint undertaking with Samsung.”

Samsung said that it plans to set up an online testbed and a collaboration hub with Red Hat called Samsung Memory Research Cloud (SMRC), where the two companies will develop and examine their latest software services on diverse server environments. Customers and partners of Samsung and Red Hat will be able to evaluate the companies’ software products on SMRC.

The SMRC platform will open in the second half of this year, according to Samsung.

This marks the first time that Samsung Electronics collaborated with an open-source software company. The companies also said that they plan to participate in open source communities such as the Linux Foundation.

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]