Formation of Ceph Market Development Group

The Ceph Foundation, dedicated to enabling industry members to collaborate and pool resources to support the Ceph community, announced the formation of the Ceph Market Development Group.

The group, composed of industry organizations, including Canonical Ltd, Red Hat, Inc. and SoftIron Ltd, will collaborate to raise awareness and educate enterprises (and other organizations facing modern scaling demands) on the benefits of Ceph storage.

As part of its founding, the group will be hosting a session during Ceph Month in June, in which several of its members will be providing project initiative updates, market research, and education around the use of open-source Ceph.

“It’s been very exciting to see Ceph continually grow in strength and maturity over the years, and the formation of the Ceph Market Development Group is another milestone in the advancement of Ceph,” said Sage Weil, founder and chief architect, Ceph, and Ceph principal architect. “As a distributed open-source storage platform, Ceph is among the most robust storage options available and can transform an organization’s IT infrastructure, enhancing its ability to manage vast amounts of data. Ceph’s ability to handle object, block, and file system storage in a single unified storage cluster is a game-changer for organizations looking for flexible, highly reliable options that scale with their growing data. The commitment that the organizations involved with the Ceph Market Development Group are showing is further validation for the strength of Ceph and its utility as an open-source storage manager for organizations operating at virtually any scale.“

Ceph is an open-source unified, distributed storage system designed for performance, reliability and scalability. It offers object, block, and file storage protocols in a single unified storage cluster, providing uncommon flexibility to meet next-gen and legacy application needs. Applications can interface to the same Ceph cluster simultaneously, providing thousands of client hosts or KVMs access to petabytes to exabytes of data – all while maintaining data consistency and durability across exabyte-scale footprints (including those that are geographically distributed).

Data protection and performance functions are tuneable down to individual services, enabling a consolidation of workloads and the elimination of orphaned storage silos, while rebalancing data within the cluster dynamically, eliminating tedious tasks for administrators while delivering performance and infinite scalability.

Ceph is being used by organizations of all types, including enterprise Ceph Foundation members such as Amihan Travel Tours SARL, Bloomberg L.P., Digital Ocean, Inc., Intel Corp., OVH SAS, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., XSky Beijing Data Technology Corporation Limited , ZTE Corporation. A recent survey by the Ceph Foundation showed that commercial segments represent the overwhelming majority of Ceph use cases, at 64% over the last three years.

June is Ceph Month
The group is kicking off activities during the Ceph Foundation’s Ceph Month in June, where the foundation is delivering presentations all month long that provide insights and education into Ceph, its development, and use cases. The presentations kicked off on June 1 with a project update by founder and Ceph chief architect, Sage Weil, followed by a RADOS update by Neha Ojha, the project technical lead for Ceph’s core team focusing on RADOS (and also a principal software engineer at Red Hat).

More information and updates on the entire Ceph Month schedule, including links to presentations as they happen

“Ceph sets the pace for open source storage scalability, resilience and cost-effectiveness, and is one of the most popular elements of Canonical software-defined infrastructure” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO, Canonical. “Production-grade open source storage on Canonical Ubuntu enables very efficient private cloud and on-premise data lakes, and we are delighted to support this industry effort to grow awareness of Ceph in the global market.“

“Ceph Storage is more than a SDS solution; it’s also a community that has become the foundational layer for Red Hat Data Services solutions, embedded at the heart of Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation products,” said Mike Piech, VP and GM, cloud storage and data services, Red Hat. “As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, Red Hat is committed to continuing to grow the product and is excited to support the Ceph Market Development group’s mission to raise awareness and educate enterprises on the benefits of Ceph Storage.”

“SoftIron has pushed all-in on Ceph, having committed our company to create the ultimate productization of Ceph in the form of our HyperDrive storage appliances, to optimize Ceph’s performance. And, the recent introduction of HyperSafe Ceph Support services, designed to help organizations get the most out of Ceph with the help of our expert experience, is already proving to be very popular. We are proud to lock arms with some of the industry’s best to help educate and evangelize the benefits of Ceph – which we consider to be the ‘Linux of storage.’ Ceph is gaining traction among enterprises, and the Ceph Market Development Group will provide a catalyst to bring more accessible analyses and awareness of its benefits in these types of environments. We look forward to seeing the impact this group makes,” said Phil Straw, CEO, SoftIron.