Linux Foundation Launches Ceph Foundation With 30 Companies

The Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announces over 30 global technology leaders are forming a new foundation to support the Ceph open source project community.

The Ceph project develops a unified distributed storage system providing applications with object, block, and file system interfaces.

Founding premier members of Ceph Foundation include Amihan, Canonical, China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, ProphetStor Data Services, Red Hat, SoftIron, SUSE, Western Digital, XSKY Data Technology, and ZTE.

The Ceph Foundation will organize and distribute financial contributions in a coordinated, vendor-neutral fashion for community benefit. This will help galvanize adoption, training and in-person collaboration across the Ceph ecosystem.

“Ceph has a long track record of success when it comes to helping organizations with effectively managing high growth and expanding storage demands,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, Linux Foundation. “Under the Linux Foundation, the Ceph Foundation will be able to harness investments from a much broader group to help support the infrastructure needed to continue the success and stability of the Ceph ecosystem.”

Ceph is used by cloud providers and enterprises around the world, including financial institutions (Bloomberg, Fidelity), cloud service providers (Rackspace, Linode), academic and government institutions (Massachusetts Open Cloud), telecommunications infrastructure providers (Deutsche Telekom), auto manufacturers (BMW), software solution providers (SAP, Salesforce).

Ceph is also used by Rook, a cloud native computing foundation project that brings seamless provisioning of file, block and object storage services into the Kubernetes environment, running the Ceph storage infrastructure in containers alongside applications that are consuming that storage.

Efficient, agile, and scalable, Ceph lowers the cost of storing enterprise information in the private cloud and provides HA to any object, file, and block data. Unstructured data makes up 80% and more of enterprise data, is growing at the rate of 55% to 65% per year, and is common with rich-media, predictive analytics, sensors, social networks, and satellite imagery. Block and file storage are critical to any IT infrastructure organization and are important components of infrastructure platforms like OpenStack and Kubernetes. According to user surveys, roughly two-thirds of OpenStack clouds use Ceph block storage.

The growth of new cloud, container and AI/machine learning applications are driving increased use of Ceph. For example, Ceph combined with analytics and machine learning enables enterprises to comb through mass amounts of unstructured data to quickly spot patterns with customer behavior, online customer conversations and potential noncompliance scenarios.

The Ceph Foundation is the successor framework to the Ceph Advisory Board, which was formed in 2015.

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“A guiding vision for Ceph is to be the state of the art for reliable, scale-out storage, and to do so with 100% open source,” said Sage Weil, Ceph co-creator, project leader, and chief architect, Red Hat for Ceph. “While early public cloud providers popularized self-service storage infrastructure, Ceph brings the same set of capabilities to service providers, enterprises, and individuals alike, with the power of a robust development and user community to drive future innovation in the storage space. Today’s launch of the Ceph Foundation is a testament to the strength of a diverse open source community coming together to address the explosive growth in storage and services.”

“Ceph was designed and built for scalability, initially with supercomputers and later with cloud infrastructure in mind. A key design premise was that the storage system needs to provide a highly reliable and available service in a dynamic and increasingly heterogeneous hardware environment where everything can potentially fail,” said Carlos Maltzahn, University of California, Santa Cruz, a co-founder of the research project that first created Ceph over a decade ago.

Cephalocon and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019
The Ceph Foundation plans to host the second Cephalocon conference in Barcelona, Spain from May 19-20, 2019, co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019, May 20-23. The first Cephalocon took place in March 2018 in Beijing, China, bringing together 1,000 attendees consisting of Ceph vendors, users, and developers in the world.

Founding Members

Founding members of the Ceph Foundation at the Premier level include Amihan, Canonical, China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, ProphetStor Data Services, Red Hat, SoftIron, SUSE, Western Digital, XSKY Data Technology, and ZTE.
Ceph Foundation General embers include Ambedded Technology, Ar, Catalyst Cloud, Croit GmbH, EasyStack, Intelligent Systems Services, Pingan Technology, QCT, Sinorail, and Xiaoju Science Technology.

Associate members include Boston University Information Services and Technology, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), FAS Research Computing – Harvard, Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET), Monash University, South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and University of California Santa Cruz’s Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS).

“As a founding member of the Ceph Foundation, Amihan is committed to contributing its knowledge and expertise in cloud-native infrastructure to the advancement of the Ceph project. Building on Ceph has allowed us to provide our enterprise clients with the most reliable foundation for digital transformation,” said Winston Damarillo, executive chairman, Amihan Global Strategies.

“Ceph delivers enterprise-grade storage with best-in-class economics. Given the exponential growth we are witnessing in our customers’ data requirements, we recognize it to be a fundamental part of the open source private cloud stack. Our participation in the launch of the Ceph Foundation underlines our commitment to accelerating its adoption, technology base and developer community,” said Christian Reis, VP, data centre field engineering, Canonical Ltd.

“China Mobile always embraces Open Source and gives back to Open Source. Ceph is the best implementation of Open Source Software Define Storage, and it has been widely used in China Mobile’s data center. We are very happy to join Ceph Foundation and make Ceph more closer to enterprise storage level,” said Junwei Liu, vice GM of cloud computing department, China Mobile (Suzhou) Software Technology Co., Ltd.

“Open source has been a key part of our business from the start. Ceph is a core component of our fast-growing storage infrastructure and one of the many open source projects we use at DigitalOcean to accelerate innovation and deliver great products for our customers. We are proud to be a founding member of the Ceph Foundation. As a leading cloud provider we believe it is our responsibility to give back to the open source community and support the projects that help developers build amazing apps,” said Shiven Ramji, VP of product, DigitalOcean, LLC.

“The incredible growth of data generated by connected devices, services, and modern software requires an advanced, adaptable storage platform to help gain the greatest value from all this information. Ceph’s open innovation is key for the industry to address these demands. Intel is proud to join the Ceph Foundation and support the redefinition of storage,” said Imad Sousou, corporate VP and GM open source technology center, Intel Corporation.

“OVH is thrilled to join the newly created Ceph Foundation as a Premier member. Its Open Source values fit in very well with our own DNA, which is marked by openness, innovation and freedom of choice. With Ceph being the de-facto standard Software Defined Storage solution for OpenStack, it was only logical for us to adopt Ceph as part of our Public Cloud block storage. “We have been using Ceph for many years and have since contributed numerous patches that went upstream in Ceph, co-hosted the Ceph Day in Warsaw and shared our experience with Ceph at various events. As one of the founding sponsors of the Ceph Foundation, we are now excited to make an even stronger contribution to the Ceph community and help take it to the next level,” said Alain Fiocco, EVP CTO, OVH.

“Ceph is the future of storage. We at ProphetStor are proud to have contributed our machine learning technology to its community to help bring it to the forefront of the storage industry,” said Jeremy Wei, VP of corporate business development, ProphetStor Data Services, Inc.

“Red Hat is honored to be deeply involved as a leader in open source communities as modern enterprises pivot toward an open hybrid cloud model. The creation of the Ceph Foundation brings to bear collaboration across the industry to enable rapid adoption of advanced data services and cloud-native technologies,” said Sarangan Rangachari, VP and GM, Red Hat storage.

“Ceph is quickly becoming the de facto standard for storage at scale. We are proud to be a part of that success and support the new Ceph Foundation. Ceph is a shining example of how open source software can squeeze out inefficiencies in very large markets,” said Tim Massey, CEO, SoftIron Limited.

“The formation of the Ceph Foundation under the Linux Foundation umbrella reflects the professional growth of the Open Source community and increasing industry participation. The new framework will lead to more community collaboration, outreach, inclusion and market awareness. SUSE is pleased and committed to be a top tier contributor to both the technical community and the foundation to help facilitate innovation in software-defined storage and represent the interests of our customers and partners,” said Lars Marowsky-Brée, distinguished engineer, SUSE LLC.

“As a technology leader enabling cutting-edge technologies with data infrastructure, we understand and believe in open standards, open software, and open ecosystems. The establishment of the Ceph Foundation is an important milestone that we are proud to support,” said Allen Samuels, engineering fellow, Western Digital, Inc.

“With the establishment of Ceph Foundation, Ceph is opening a new era in global development. Together with other members, XSKY will spare no effort to push forward the construction of a broader Ceph ecosystem and explore commercial models for open-source software. We aim to achieve a landing storage approach of HA and high-reliability for users in mass data era,” said Haomai Wang, CTO, XSky Beijing Data Technology Corporation Limited.

“It has been my pleasure to see the growth in popularity of Ceph in China over the last several years, and the power of Ceph of transforming numerous organizations’ IT infrastructure. Open source is a huge opportunity for organizations to work cooperatively to improve software and to benefit from each others’ hard work, and the establishment of Ceph Foundation will definitely accelerate its development and bring us a real future of storage,” said Xinyu Chen, GM of telecom cloud & CoreNet product, ZTE Corporation.