Red Hat Opens Ceph Up to Stewardship By Major Tech Players

Back in 2014, Red Hat acquired Ceph, giving it a pathway to innovate in the world of software-defined, distributed storage systems. Ceph integrates block, object and file system-based storage devices into a single storage cluster, which has become a huge requirement in the cloud.

At the recent Tokyo OpenStack Summit, Red Hat announced that Ceph is now stewarded through collaboration via the newly formed Ceph Advisory Board. It's a move very much in the spirit of open source.

Ceph has steadily been used to plug into both CloudStack and OpenStack. In particular, it has emerged as the most popular option for distributed block storage among OpenStack users. It has helped to transform the storage industry just like the use of commodity hardware transformed the cloud industry, and keep in mind that Red Hat is very focused on OpenStack.

The new Ceph advisory board will focus on expanding and enhancing community participation and collaboration for the Ceph project, working closely with the community's technical and user committees.

The board includes leaders from a number of companies with reputations in the open source space, including Canonical, CERN, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk and SUSE.

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

"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."

The new board is good news for Ceph, and kudos to Red Hat for opening the Ceph kimono. It is now stewarded by leading companies that can help advance its capabilities in big ways.