Inktank Ceph Enterprise: time for change in the storage market
In April 2012, Inktank was launched to transform the storage industry by driving the widespread adoption of Ceph. We wanted to bring the benefits of open source to an industry that had long held out against its disruptive effects and to help companies handle the explosion in data with a radical new way of storing and managing information.
18 months later, Ceph has become the default storage choice for service providers and enterprises deploying public or private clouds, particularly among Openstack users. As Ceph has gained a foothold in these new fast-moving deployments, we’ve also seen a tremendous appetite from storage teams to use Ceph to address not just the cloud and greenfield projects but many of their other existing storage challenges. Here the demand is naturally for a rock solid, flexible and easy to manage and scale solution, but critically, one that fundamentally changes the economics of the IT storage budget for the next 10 to 20 years.
With both the vanguard and traditional use-case customers in mind, I am proud to announce that today we are launching our flagship product – Inktank Ceph Enterprise.
Designed to make it easy to buy and use Ceph, the product will look very familiar to those who already buy open source products – a subscription consisting of software and services backed by a commercial organization that develops the technology.
At its foundation is a stable, production-ready version of Ceph – 100% open source and vendor lock-in free, with a long-term support commitment on the software from Inktank.
On top of this, we layer tools which make a Ceph cluster easier to use, including a graphical cluster manager application called Calamari, ensuring that operations scale as easily as the cluster does.
Finally, we provide support services including SLA-backed technical support with defect escalations and feature prioritization. Backed by experts in scale-out storage, you can be confident that not only do we have your back covered, but you can influence the direction of the software.
Our goals for Inktank Ceph Enterprise are not complicated:
We are making it easy for businesses to bring Ceph into their IT infrastructure. Yes, we’re open source but the process and experience of evaluating, purchasing and deploying should not feel alien, and we want the experience to be even better than dealing with legacy storage vendors. A discrete product with price and features makes it easy to compare and contrast against the competition. We’re confident you’ll be impressed.
We are taking away the complexity of understanding an open source project and deliver the best, most stable and reliable code to the operations team. The Ceph community releases frequently but Inktank want to ensure that the customer gets the most suitable version of the code, with a clear lifecycle and support guarantee. We worry about navigating the Ceph project so you don’t have to.
We are providing ongoing value to the customer and continue to reduce TCO to squeeze the excess margins from the industry. Today Inktank Ceph Enterprise comes with the essentials to run Ceph in production but we will be adding more features over time to the subscription, specifically to allow existing enterprise software infrastructure to work with Ceph. As a business we aren’t interested in extracting more from you under the pressure of vendor lock-in, as our legacy competitors do, but, in fact, want to give you more value per gigabyte each year.
Inktank’s ambition is large but we feel the time is right to change things in the storage industry. We want Ceph to become the “Linux” of the storage world and we hope that with the launch of Inktank Ceph Enterprise, businesses everywhere can now take advantage of the technical and economic benefits of Ceph in their data centers.
To learn more about Inktank Ceph Enterprise, visit inktank.com/enterprise.
