Calxeda and Inktank Teaming Up

Calxeda Inc., a player in the
low power server market, unveiled its partnership with Inktank
Storage Inc., the company delivering the Ceph
distributed storage system.

The
companies are working together to optimize Ceph’s performance and
stability on the Calxeda server architecture in order to provide the
market with a different storage platform. This collaborative effort,
which also includes several customers and OEMs, will result in
benchmarked, Inktank-certified reference architectures hitting the
market early this summer.

The combination of Ceph and Calxeda creates a system that leverages
Ceph’s software-defined storage architecture and Calxeda’s low-power,
high density server architecture to increase scalability,
manageability and lower overall acquisition and operational costs.
This platform is the system for tackling the challenges of use case
proliferation (legacy, big data, cloud, etc.), data growth explosion,
and cost pressures being felt within enterprises and service
providers today.

"There is a paradigm shift occurring in the storage industry:
explosive data growth is causing everyone to re-evaluate their
existing solutions," said Barry Evans, Calxeda CEO. "The
‘old way’ of doing things is just not viable; it is too costly to
sustain at the rate and pace of growing business needs. Our low power
servers combined with the Ceph open source storage system and
Inktank’s expertise meets emerging business needs."

Ceph is an open source, distributed, software-defined storage
system that is scalable, self-managing and runs on commodity
hardware. It delivers object, block, and file storage in an
integrated system that satisfies the majority of the use cases for
enterprises today. By collaborating with Inktank – the Ceph experts –
the company is enabling its OEM partners to deliver a storage
solution optimized for ARM-based servers, tailored for businesses
building public or private clouds and for virtual image storage
infrastructure.

"There is tremendous demand from customers and OEMs alike for
Inktank and Calxeda to combine forces to take on the incumbents in
both the storage and server markets," said Bryan
Bogensberger, CEO of Inktank. "We are working quickly to
enable and optimize Ceph on Calxeda to both better support those who
have already combined the solutions themselves and to make it easier
for those new to this opportunity to evaluate, adopt, operate and
benefit from this transformative storage platform."

Calxeda-based servers deployed with Ceph enable storage servers that
focus first on performance of the disk and network, critical in
distributed storage appliances.

The
architecture is designed to distribute a storage cluster over
multiple servers. When one server goes down, the rest of the cluster
heals itself. As the number of servers for a specific cluster size
increases, failure rates decrease and the healing process takes less
time and resources. The ARM-based servers enable clusters to have
more servers and thus lower failure rates and more efficient healing,
all in the same amount of space and with reduced power consumption.
The result is that servers deliver better performance per dollar at
reduced power consumption and better rack density.