Red Hat opens up Ceph storage to other cloud leaders

Summary: Red Hat is opening up Ceph's open-source, object and block cloud program leadership to other leading companies such as Canonical and SUSE.

Red Hat's Ceph is a popular software-defined object and file cloud storage stack. While the code is open source, Red Hat has directed the project's strategic direction. At the Toyko OpenStack Summit, Red Hat announced its Ceph-based software-defined storage technology's formal collaboration is now in the hands of the newly formed Ceph Advisory Board.

Specifically, "the advisory board launches with the goal of expanding and enhancing community participation and collaboration for the Ceph project, working closely with the community's technical and user committees."

Besides Red Hat, the Ceph Advisory Board includes members from Canonical, CERN, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, SanDisk, and SUSE. In short, Ceph is no longer just a Red Hat play.
That's not surprising. Open-source Ceph has already proven to be able to provide object, block, and file system storage in a single, unified storage cluster. That makes it well-suited for cloud storage infrastructures. Already, according to the most recent OpenStack Foundation user survey, Ceph is Openstack's most popular block storage solution.

In a statement, Tim Burke, Red Hat's VP of Infrastructure Engineering Development, explained:

"Red Hat is all about collaboratively working among communities to accomplish vastly more than any single company could do alone. ... While that collaboration with community and partner members was strong even on an informal basis, the creation of the Ceph Advisory Board formalizes this open working relationship. We look forward to working with Ceph's community and partner members to not only add features, but also to improve the integration and ease of use into new workloads."

Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company and a Red Hat rival, agrees. Canonical's vice president of Storage & Hyperscale Christian Reis takes a large share of credit for Ceph:

"Canonical has driven Ceph from the outset as a key technology in Ubuntu OpenStack and scale-out storage deployments. We are delighted to participate in the Ceph Advisory Board to help broaden the input, reach and maturity of Ceph as an enterprise-grade storage platform."

Lars Marowsky-Brée, SUSE Distinguished Engineer, and another Red Hat rival, added, "The Ceph Advisory Board is a key step for the Ceph project on the way from an open source project to becoming an open standard with industry-wide collaboration and adoption. SUSE is excited to participate in this group effort to help the open source software-defined storage revolution take shape."
This development came after Ceph's code repositories were raided. Sources at Red Hat stated that this site crack had nothing to do with the creation of the Advisory Board.

Welcome to Linux and open-source software where business rivals work hand-in-hand with code.
The Ceph Community Advisory Board will manage the Ceph software-defined storage project broad issues. The goal is to make Ceph, the cloud storage system.