Ceph Foundation Announces Formation of Ceph Market Development Group

San Francisco — June 21, 2021 – The Ceph Foundation, dedicated to enabling industry members to collaborate and pool resources to support the Ceph community, today announced the formation of the Ceph Market Development Group. The new group, composed of leading industry organizations, including Canonical, Red Hat and SoftIron , 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 Ceph Market Development 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, the founder and chief architect of Ceph, and the 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 excellent performance, reliability and scalability. Ceph offers object, block, and file storage protocols in a single unified storage cluster, providing uncommon flexibility to meet next-generation 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 high-performance and infinite scalability. Ceph is being used by organizations of all types, including enterprise Ceph Foundation members such as Amihan, Bloomberg, Digital Ocean, Intel, OVH, Samsung, XSky, ZTE, and others. 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. For more information about Ceph: https://ceph.io.

The Ceph Market Development Group is kicking off activities now, 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 1st 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). For information and updates on the entire Ceph Month schedule, including links to presentations as they happen, please visit https://pad.ceph.com/p/ceph-month-june-2021.
“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”.
“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,” said Phil Straw, CEO, SoftIron. “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.”