The Momentum Continues to Accelerate for Inktank and Ceph

We launched Inktank in 2012 to provide enterprise-level support for the Ceph distributed storage system. Last year we witnessed a major increase in the adoption and interest in Ceph. It truly was a momentous year for us and I am thrilled to be able to share with you some of those highlights as we start 2013 together.

We established many alliances and partnerships for such a fresh face in the storage industry.

• We partnered with Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem to offer Ceph professional services and support as a part of the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution.

• We partnered with Citrix to support Ceph in their Cloud Platform.

• We partnered with Canonical as our Ceph developers continue their work expanding the integration of Ceph into Ubuntu.

• SUSE integrated Ceph into SUSE Cloud and partnered with us to deliver enterprise support.

• DreamHost launched their public cloud storage service (DreamObjects), and their cloud computing service (DreamCompute), based on Ceph and OpenStack.

• We partnered with MetaCloud to enhance their fully managed cloud solution.

• Ceph was tested, implemented and optimized within service provider, financial institutions, telecoms and many other enterprises.

• Canonical founder, Mark Shuttleworth invested $1 million to help fund the rapid growth of Inktank and to support the Ceph community.

• “I’m also delighted to support the team behind Ceph in their goal of building a commercial success story around this tremendous technology, as an investor in Inktank. Today Ceph is in the Linux kernel and Ubuntu, soon it will be everywhere.” – Mark Shuttleworth

And this is what the media and industry experts said about us?

• SD Times: Companies to Watch: 2013
• Infostor: 6 Storage Startups to Watch
• CRN: The 10 Coolest Storage Startups Of 2012 (So Far)
• CRN: 10 Hot Emerging Vendors For May 2012
• “Ceph is coming up again and again in my discussions with technologists. If the Redmonk (developers are the new kingmakers) and O’Reilly/OATV (watch the alpha geeks) theses are true, then Ceph will soon be top-of-mind for mainstream enterprise IT.” Matt Asay, The Register.
• “It seems only yesterday we put out the ‘How distributed file systems are rewriting the future of the storage ecosystem’ paper on idc.com (#236010) – and now projects like Ceph are validating it.” Ashish Nadkarni, IDC.
• “DreamHost looks to CRUSH cloud storage rivals with Ceph” Henry Baltazar, 451 Reserach.
• “Use These Key Considerations When Selecting OpenStack Storage” Arun Chandrasekaran, Sid Deshpande, Gartner.
• “Who’s Who in Open-Source, Scale-Out File System Storage”, Arun Chandrasekaran, Gartner.

Working with a passionate community means everything to the Inktank team. The goal for Ceph has always been to be the future of storage and we believe this is best accomplished with a large group effort. In 2012 this community effort was responsible for many enhancements and additions including the integration of Ceph into CloudStack 4.0.

Every month we see contributions to Ceph increasing considerably and the entire community is looking forward to this trend accelerating in 2013.

Increased Community Participation and Support in 4Q 2012 over 4Q 2011:

• There were 40% more active code authors
• There were 130% more code commits
• There were 170% more mailing list messages
• There were 425% more IRC messages

When we launched Inktank, we knew it was going to be a big year for Ceph. Even still, we have been blown away by the growing demand for Ceph storage services across the globe. Ceph solves major pain points in the industry today by delivering highly scalable, affordable storage. Now in 2013, we look forward to continuing our work with our partners, customers and the Ceph community to help transform the storage industry and satisfy storage needs, now and in the future.