UPDATED 20:15 EDT / NOVEMBER 12 2018

CLOUD

Cloud companies form Ceph Foundation to advance object storage tech

The Linux Foundation Monday announced the formation of a new “Ceph Foundation” backed by more than 30 major technology firms hoping to support and manage the popular open-source storage technology.

Ceph is a unified and distributed storage system used by some of the world’s largest cloud service providers, including Rackspace Inc. as well as major organizations such as Bloomberg L.P. and Fidelity Investments Inc. It provides object, block and file system storage and can also be used as a software-defined storage system for commodity hardware.

Ceph uses something called an Object Store to accumulate data, with each piece stored in a flat nonhierarchical namespace. The data is physically stored on what’s called a Ceph Block Device, which is a virtual drive that can be attached to virtual machines or bare metal servers. Storage is managed by the Ceph Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store, providing features such as snapshots and replication.

Ceph also allows for data to be stored in clusters of object storage devices. A single cluster can store multiple pools of data and helps to make Ceph extremely scalable.

The main advantage of Ceph is it makes managing storage easier and more affordable, since it can use pretty much any kind of server hardware.

The thinking behind creating a foundation to oversee Ceph’s development stems from the importance of block and file storage to modern information technology infrastructure. Ceph and similar object stores are especially important components of platforms such as OpenStack, which is used to build private clouds, and Kubernetes, which is used to manage software containers. A recent survey by the OpenStack Foundation revealed that two-thirds of OpenStack clouds rely on Ceph, for example.

Ceph is increasingly being adopted businesses because it allows them to store data on private clouds at lower cost, and the belief is that it will only gain in popularity as cloud and container technology becomes more widespread.

As a result, the major players behind Ceph have come to the conclusion that a formal governance structure is necessary to reconcile everyone’s interests. Hence the formation of the Ceph Foundation.

“Storage remains the key factor in next generation computing as it is the platform that powers data, the life blood of a digital economy,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “It is good to see progress in the open source arena with over 30 enterprises and vendors joining Ceph to mutually develop and help build the data layer for next generation applications.”

Some of the key founding members include Canonical Ltd., China Mobile Communications Corp., DigitalOcean LLC, Intel Corp., Red Hat Inc., SUSE, Western Digital Corp. and ZTE Corp.

“A guiding vision for Ceph is to be the state of the art for reliable, scale-out storage, and to do so with 100 percent open source,” Sage Weil, Ceph’s co-creator, project leader, and chief architect at Red Hat for Ceph, said in a statement. “While early public cloud providers popularized self-service storage infrastructure, Ceph brings the same set of capabilities to service providers, enterprises, and individuals alike, with the power of a robust development and user community to drive future innovation in the storage space.”

Image: Ceph Foundation

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