The original developers behind the open source scaling storage system known as Ceph have formed Inktank, a professional services firm that will be led by Dreamhost Co-Founder Sage Weil.

The company will offer enterprise level support for Ceph, which has grown in popularity across the globe for its capability to deliver object storage, block storage, and file storage in one unified platform that runs on commodity hardware.

Inktank will provide enterprise-grade consulting and support services to help companies implement and operate the Ceph distributed storage system, originally developed by Weil as part of his doctoratge work at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The goal is to build a worldwide developer community to guide Ceph as it matures. They are doing that with the help of Ross Turk, one of the more well-known community developer managers in the business. Turk comes from Talend. Prior to that he worked at Alcatel-Lucent.

In March, the 451 Group published a short report about Ceph. It cited Ceph’s scale-out architecture and its ability to provide file, block and object storage. It is expected to attract interest from service providers and enterprise providers looking to build out cloud storage services. It has attracted a fairly large following for its flexibility and scalability.

The 451 Group offered some criticism in its report:

Its current lack of long-distance replication capabilities and the absence of Window’s client support are key technology deficiencies for Ceph, though they should be added in the future.

The growing success of Amazon’s S3 and EBS cloud storage services is putting pressure on service providers and enterprises to build out their own offerings and should drive more attention toward software packages such as Ceph. To date, few cloud storage platforms have emerged to rival Amazon S3 because of the cost, complexity and scale limitations with existing architectures. Though it’s still very early on, the emergence of Ceph represents another potential alternative for service providers looking to build effective and profitable cloud-based storage services.