The Linux Foundation has embraced the newly established Ceph Foundation to advance open source storage across cloud and enterprises.

The Ceph project develops a unified distributed storage system providing applications with object, block, and file system interfaces. Ceph is used by cloud providers and enterprises around the world, including financial institutions and cloud service providers.

Over 30 global technology companies and organisation are initially on board the initiative. Founding members of Ceph Foundation include Amihan, Canonical, China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, ProphetStor Data Services, Red Hat, SoftIron, SUSE, Western Digital, XSKY Data Technology, and ZTE.

The growth of new cloud, container and artificial intelligence/machine learning applications are driving increased use of Ceph. For example, Ceph combined with analytics and machine learning enables enterprises to comb through mass amounts of unstructured data to quickly spot patterns with customer behaviour, online customer conversations and potential noncompliance scenarios.

“Ceph has a long track record of success when it comes to helping organizations with effectively managing high growth and expanding data storage demands,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Under the Linux Foundation, the Ceph Foundation will be able to harness investments from a much broader group to help support the infrastructure needed to continue the success and stability of the Ceph ecosystem.”

Ceph is used by cloud providers and enterprises around the world, including financial institutions (Bloomberg, Fidelity), cloud service providers (Rackspace, Linode), academic and government institutions (Massachusetts Open Cloud), telecommunications infrastructure providers (Deutsche Telekom), auto manufacturers (BMW), software solution providers (SAP, Salesforce), and many more.

Ceph claims to be massively scalable and significantly lowers the cost of storing enterprise information in the private cloud and provides high availability to any object, file, and block data. Unstructured data makes up 80 per cent and more of enterprise data, is growing at the rate of 55 per cent to 65 per cent per year, and is common with rich-media, predictive analytics, sensors, social networks and satellite imagery.

Block and file storage are critical to any IT infrastructure organization and are important components of infrastructure platforms like OpenStack and Kubernetes. According to recent user surveys, roughly two-thirds of OpenStack clouds use Ceph block storage.

The Ceph Foundation is the successor framework to the Ceph Advisory Board, which was formed in 2015.

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