Red Hat Inc. is teaming up with San Disk Corp. in the realm of open-source distributed storage. The two companies have just announced a new partnership that’ll see them deliver an integrated storage solution based on the scale-out storage platform Ceph.

Ceph was developed by Inktank Storage, a Los Angeles-based startup acquired by Red Hat for $175 million back in April 2014. The platform was designed for building file systems that can be spread across multiple servers, and now powers Red Hat Ceph Storage, an enterprise storage platform that’s integrated with Red Hat’s famed GNU/Linux distribution. But besides the integration, Red Hat had done little else with the technology, until today.

The team up with San Disk represents Red Hat’s first big channel play with Ceph. The partnership will see Red Hat Ceph offered alongside San Disk’s InfiniFlash storage system, creating a “high-performance storage solution that works with commodity hardware”, the companies said. And that is exactly what Ceph’s designers first set out to do.

“The combination of open, software-defined storage from Red Hat and flash storage from SanDisk enables companies to serve a broad set of workloads with more tightly integrated, high-performing storage that scales,” Red Hat said in a statement.

The development comes after San Disk announced it was making big contributions to the Ceph project just last month, and represents a breakthrough for a company that until recent, has largely kept its distance from the open-source ecosystem.

The news is further evidence that open-source storage systems designed for the cloud and computing clusters are rapidly going mainstream, especially with Red Hat throwing its considerable enterprise support behind Ceph. Of course, Ceph is still some way from being the dominant storage platform in this nascent market, but with Red Hat and San Disk working together, it’ll take a brave man to bet against it happening.

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