Ceph storage project buoyed by new open-source foundation
Mon 12 Nov 2018

More than 30 firms have joined Ceph Foundation, a new project hosted by the Linux Foundation to support and manage Ceph open-source storage technology
Ceph technology provides storage for some of the largest cloud providers and organisations around the world, including financial institutions Bloomberg and Fidelity, and cloud service providers Rackspace and Linode.
Block and file storage are critical to IT infrastructure and are important components of the OpenStack and Kubernetes platforms. According to recent user surveys, roughly two-thirds of OpenStack clouds use Ceph.
Businesses are increasingly turning to Ceph to store enterprise information cheaply on the private cloud and reliance on it is only going to increase with the growth of new cloud, container, and artificial intelligence applications.
According to recent estimates, unstructured data makes up 80 percent of enterprise data, and is growing at a rate of 60 percent per year.
As is the case for any ballooning tech community, major players have noticed the need for a governance solution that reconciles the interests of its stakeholders. The newly-launched Ceph Foundation is yet another project hosted by The Linux Foundation.
Announcing its memberships include firms Amihan, Canonical, China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, ProphetStor Data Services, Red Hat, SoftIron, SUSE, Western Digital, XSKY Data Technology, and ZTE.
“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 at 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 data storage and services.”