Ceph Community Forms Advisory Board

The Ceph Community, the worldwide collection of developers working to build the Ceph Software-Defined Storage (SDS) project, announced the formation of an advisory board to assist the community in driving the direction of open source SDS technology.

The advisory board launches with the goal of expanding and enhancing community participation and collaboration for the Ceph project, working closely with the community’s technical and user committees.

The charter advisory board includes Ceph community members from IT organizations that are committed to the Ceph project, including individuals from Canonical Ltd, CERN, Cisco Systems, Inc, Fujitsu Ltd, Intel Corporation, Red Hat, Inc., SanDisk Corporation, and SUSE, LLC.

With the ability to provide object, block, and file system storage in a single, unified storage cluster, Ceph is well-suited for cloud infrastructures, such as OpenStack. The Ceph Community has grown over the past several years and, according to the OpenStack Foundation User October 2015 Survey, Ceph is the most popular block storage solution for OpenStack deployments.

Tim Burke, VP of infrastructure engineering development, Red Hat, stated: “Red Hat is all about collaboratively working among communities to accomplish vastly more than any single company could do alone. When we acquired Inktank, Red Hat’s commitment was to maintain the spirit and involvement of a diverse set of contributors in Ceph. While that collaboration with community and partner members was strong even on an informal basis, the creation of the Ceph advisory board formalizes this open working relationship. We look forward to working with Ceph’s community and partner members to not only add features, but also to improve the integration and ease of use into new workloads.“

The Ceph Community advisory board is the forum for overall Ceph Community participant cooperation and the orchestration of feedback collection and resource allocation. With quarterly meetings and monthly working group meetings, the Ceph Community advisory board will manage the broad issues and opportunities that are critical to the momentum and success of the Ceph SDS project.

Christian Reis, VP, storage and hyperscale, Canonical, said: “Canonical has driven Ceph from the outset as a key technology in Ubuntu OpenStack and scale-out storage deployments, and we are delighted to participate in the Ceph advisory board to help broaden the input, reach and maturity of Ceph as an enterprise-grade storage platform.“

Dan van der Ster, data and storage services group, CERN, said: “Ceph is an innovative open source storage system that CERN uses today to manage close to 5PB of cloud storage. Having participated for nearly two years within its active contributor community, we are pleased that the Ceph project is formalising this important relationship with its community, and look forward to representing the unique perspective of academic users and contributors at this forum.“

Paul von Stamwitz, senior storage architect, Fujitsu, said: “With our mutual commitment to the ongoing success of Ceph, we look forward to participating in this next step of community cooperation.“

Dan Ferber, open source server based storage technologist, Intel, said: “I am enthusiastic about bringing the perspectives and challenges faced by enterprise and cloud service providers to the Ceph community board. We believe that by working with the Ceph community we can help Ceph to deliver performance and functionality for current and the next generations of intelligent storage systems.“

Patrick McGarry, Ceph Community lead, Red Hat, said: “The Ceph project has a unique opportunity to capitalize on the momentum given to us by Red Hat, and the greater Ceph ecosystem, to increase contributions and streamline participation. While the Ceph project has been growing, a participatory governance structure will enable the community to use existing expertise to further mentor, assist and lead the future of storage.“

Allen Samuels, engineering follow, SanDisk, said: “Data center customers are demanding extreme performance and massive capacity storage solutions to address continuous scale challenges of applications, services, and ultimately information growth. The formation of a Ceph advisory board is essential to fueling Ceph as a scale-out platform of choice. SanDisk is a major contributor to Ceph development, enabling new use cases with the combination of Ceph and flash memory technology, and now looks forward to contributing our customer experience to the advisory board to drive broader Ceph and flash storage adoption.“

Lars Marowsky-Brée, distinguished engineer, SUSE, said: “The Ceph advisory board is a key step for the Ceph project on the way from an open source project to becoming an open standard with industry-wide collaboration and adoption. SUSE is excited to participate in this group effort to help the open source software-defined storage revolution take shape.“