Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Ceph Storage Group

Open source storage gets a boost today as the Linux Foundation launches the Ceph Foundation with more than 30 members including China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, and Red Hat.The Ceph project is a unified distributed storage system providing applications with object, block, and file system interfaces. It was co-founded more than a decade ago by Sage Weil, who is now chief architect at Red Hat for Ceph, and University of California, Santa Cruz professor Carlos Maltzahn. A whole team of storage engineers now manage and maintain the open source code.Ceph users include cloud service providers such as Rackspace and Linode, telecommunications infrastructure providers like Deutsche Telekom, software companies including SAP and Salesforce, and other major enterprises such as Cisco, BMW, Fidelity, and Bloomberg. Object storage, which is typically used in the cloud, is the preferred storage option for unstructured data like video, audio, and social media postings, as well as big data, analytics, sensors and large-scale IoT workloads. Unstructured data makes up 80 percent or more of enterprise data and is growing at the rate of 55 percent to 65 percent per year.