It’s hard to believe that just over three weeks ago we launched Inktank, the first professional services and support company for Ceph. Since then, we shipped the entire company to Vegas for our launch party, exhibited at Interop, announced our inclusion in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and, just recently, moved into our very own office space.
In the words of the great Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Life is certainly moving fast here at Inktank, but we like it fast and we’re enjoying every moment.
After a brief weekend of sleep and detox, which was absolutely required after the long hours leading up to our launch, we hit the road for Las Vegas to exhibit at Interop. We brought a variety of ways to show off our updated Inktank and Ceph branding: a new booth, new banners, and a cool new vid that promotes our burgeoning Inktank corporate culture.
Even though the legacy Ceph octopus isn’t featured in our updated branding, we didn’t want to leave our friend behind. We made sure that he was included in the new t-shirts, and that everyone had one to take home.
In Vegas, surrounded by companies who try to sell their products through sleaze and shock, it’s refreshing to be able to sell ours through our slimy, salty cephalopod friend.
Since it became clear that we have a knack for fashion, we decided to go out on a limb with our official launch party threads: a black Inktank polo shirt, accented with a very expensive, Italian silk, 18th-century vintage white tie. Or whatever we could find that was white. Probably due to our amazing style and elegance, the Inktank launch party at Chateau at the Paris Hotel in Vegas proved to be an epic night all-around. With help from our aunts and uncles at DreamHost and along with all of the new friends we’ve met along the way, everybody involved made sure that the world felt our presence. Here you can see a few pics of the excitement and fun taking place. Clearly some of our engineers enjoyed the black, inky goodness of our signature “Inktanker” drink a bit too much. 
In the middle of all the excitement of Interop and our company launch, we were nominated for ‘Best of Interop’ and announced that Ceph was included in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The excitement surrounding our booth could have reasonably been described as ‘Breathtaking’
Only recently, just like a teen moving out of the family nest for college, it was now time for Inktank to spread its tentacles and to move out into the big bad world. Now when I say ‘the big bad world’, I actually mean directly across the hall from DreamHost…. but hey, baby steps turn into big steps. We have no problem walking across the hall to grab snacks from time to time.
Finally, just last night we saw Inktank sponsor its first OpenStack LA meet-up, hosted by ATT and sponsored by DreamHost. The theme for the night was “Return of the Ceph Lords”. We heard some great conversations and talks from our very own Ceph engineer, Josh Durgin, and Christopher MacGown, CTO & Co-Founder of Piston Cloud.
So as you can see, there is a lot happening all the time. Going back to what Ferris Bueller said, things are certainly moving fast here at Inktank. We like fast. We enjoy fast. Fast is exciting and we’re certainly excited to deliver the future of storage.
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Looks awesome. Got to get me one of those t’s!