Ross Turk, Vice President of Community at Inktank, visited SiliconAngle’s theCube during the OpenStack Summit taking place in Portland this week to discuss Inktank’s open source project, Ceph, and the current community environment with John Furrier and Jeff Frick.

The Ceph Project has been in development since 2004, and is a commodity storage software layer that exposes the storage resources of the hardware that its sitting on top of. Furrier asked Turk what kind of traction Ceph is getting with OpenStack, and what sets it apart from other storage software.

The first reason is the lowest-cost-per-gig, Turk readily answered. Keeping storage costs down is key, especially when scale is becoming more and more of an issue, and, because of Ceph’s self-managing and self-healing capabilities, it is designed for just that. The other reason is Ceph’s focus on integration with cloud, especially with OpenStack.

In the Ceph community, there has been overwhelming growth in participation. While proceeding in an orderly fashion with everyone who wants to contribute to the project, Ceph’s community management team also has to focus on who will maintain the project’s quality and its architectural integrity, making governance a main challenge.

Turk also discussed what trends he’s seen in the open source community. Everyone who, in the early days, was saying “I’m an open source person,” is now saying “I’m a cloud person,” Turk describes, it’s an interesting movement. The open source and cloud communities are really intermingling. Additionally, it’s great to see that everyone has now realized the importance and value of the community. All kinds of companies that didn’t have community intelligence before, definitely have it now.