IDC says that spending for cloud storage will triple by 2015. It had better, because the roster of companies with their hands out for some of those storage dollars keeps growing. The latest contender is Inktank, a service and support company formed by the creators of the Ceph open source storage project.
With all the cloud storage competition coming out of the woodwork, how does Ceph distinguish itself? It started as a doctoral project by Sage Weil, at UC Santa Cruz back in 2004. The question is whether Weil’s academic project has evolved enough to take a chunk of the storage market?
All About Ceph
Ross Turk, Inktank’s VP of community, says that Ceph is designed for “multiple data storage needs with a unified storage platform.” Some storage offerings, for example, provide object storage, but not block storage. Some solutions might provide object and block storage, but aren’t POSIX-compatible.
Turk says that Ceph does all of the above. “It provides object storage, similar to Amazon’s S3 and compatible with apps written for Amazon S3. It provides the kind of block device storage necessary for VM images, thinly provisioned and striped across the entire storage cluster. Finally, it provides a bottleneck-free, POSIX-compliant network filesystem. It does all of that on top of a single storage cluster, so it’s not necessary to have separate clusters for each different storage need.”
Just as importantly, Turk says that Ceph’s distributed capabilities make it a compelling option for companies looking to fill big storage needs. First,
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