Inktank » Inktank

The Momentum Continues to Accelerate for Inktank and Ceph

Bryan — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 22:23:19 +0000

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.

Launch of our new Pre-Production subscription

nwl — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:49:54 +0000

Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of our new Ceph subscription for pre-production support. The plan is designed for users of Ceph who are in the deployment phase of building a Ceph system and need immediate advice on configuration options or direct access to best practice information.

Ceph is becoming easier and easier to deploy with the release of Chef recipes, Juju Charms, and other tools, but the optimal configuration for a Ceph cluster can vary from site to site, based on application needs or performance criteria. Our engineers have developed a tremendous body of knowledge around the best configuration for specific environments as a result of working on many customer deployments, from large to small.

The Ceph Pre-Production Subscription allows users of Ceph to speed up the proof-of-concept phase or production deployment of Ceph by gaining direct access to support from engineers, eliminating the time involved in scanning mail archives or pouring through documentation. Timely, relevant and informed advice means you can get comfortable with Ceph before purchasing our full production support.

The plan features unlimited support requests by email and is charged on a subscription basis based on named contacts. We’re keen to share the knowledge we have gained building and using Ceph and believe this plan is the best way to help new users get up and running as quickly as possible.

You can learn more about the offering here.

Mark Shuttleworth Believes Ceph Soon Will be Everywhere, Supports Inktank

Bryan — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:25:37 +0000

We are thrilled to announce today that Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, has invested $1M in Inktank. Mark has been a strong advocate for Ceph, and it is very exciting to see him back Inktank as the company delivering enterprise-grade support and services for Ceph – The Future of Storage.

In the press release we released today, Mark said,

“Ceph redefines storage as an open source service, meeting one of the key challenges for enterprises and cloud providers who need scalable and cost-effective storage. The distinctive architecture of Ceph gives it natural advantages over both proprietary and open source competitors. We found Ceph to be mature enough to warrant its inclusion in Ubuntu 12.10 as a storage option for our OpenStack reference architecture, widely deployed in both telco and corporate environments. 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.”

We are delighted to accept Mark’s support. Mark is well-known to support industry changing open source initiatives that shake up the status quo in existing markets. Ceph is well-positioned to be one of these transformational technologies. Mark’s support will help us meet the massive demand that we are seeing for Ceph support and services. Thank you Mark.