DreamHost Looks to Crush Cloud Storage Rivals With Ceph, Including Amazon S3

DreamHost, a registered trademark of New Dream Network, LLC and principal sponsor of Ceph, the open-source, massively scalable distributed storage platform, was reviewed by 451 Research, which published a report previewing the impact of the Ceph project on cloud computing.

The report, titled DreamHost looks to CRUSH cloud storage rivals with Ceph. Written by 451 analyst Henry Baltazar, the report draws several conclusions, including:

"Ceph’s scale-out architecture and its ability to provide file, block and object storage should attract interest from service providers and enterprises looking to build out cloud storage services. The Ceph software has attracted a fairly large following, and DreamHost is now looking to forge partnerships with hardware vendors and Linux distributions."

"The growing success of Amazon’s S3 and EBS cloud storage services is putting pressure on service providers and enterprises to build out their own offerings, and should drive more attention toward software packages such as Ceph. To date, few cloud storage platforms have emerged to rival Amazon S3 because of the cost, complexity and scale limitations with existing architectures. Though it’s still very early on, the emergence of Ceph represents another potential alternative for service providers looking to build effective and profitable cloud-based storage services."

Baltazar is a Senior Analyst in the Enterprise Storage Research team at 451 Research, focusing on data protection and storage software technologies. Prior to joining 451 Research, he spent nearly nine years working as a technical analyst for eWeek Labs, where he covered storage, server hardware and network operating systems.

"We are pleased with the growing recognition within the technical community that Ceph is solving critical issues around massively scalable distributed storage," said Bryan Bogensberger, President and COO of Ceph Storage at DreamHost.

Bogensberger will head a new company launching in Q1 2012 that will provide professional services and long-term support for Ceph.