Ceph for Enterprise, a shared mission.

This week, the final week of Ceph Month, the Ceph Foundation announced the creation of the Ceph Market Development Working Group.  Canonical is proud to be amongst the founding members of the group, alongside fellow community members RedHat and SoftIron.

Open source enterprise storage

The group’s primary objectives are to raise wider awareness and understanding that Ceph is capable of being deployed in enterprise settings, and not just in developer orientated circles where it currently sees significant uptake (for example, according to the 2020 Openstack User Survey 74% of deployments are using Ceph for their block storage needs).  The wider storage market is awash of options, both traditional hardware and more modern software-defined solutions.  The desire of the group is to ensure that Ceph makes it into storage decision makers’ minds as a production-proven open-source powered alternative to typical proprietary options.  

Over the coming months, the Market Development Group will lead various educational efforts such as the publication of vendor-agnostic case studies, and use case analysis on the refreshed ceph.io website, as well as the creation of a speakers bureau, where requests can be made for Ceph community experts to share their experiences, and also by providing greater visibility at future in-person and virtual events.

The group aims to act as a conduit between enterprise end users and the core developers to ensure that the direction of the project continues to serve the needs of the user base.  The group will work with the various sub-project leads to understand the “why” behind new features on the roadmap, assist in explaining them to current and potential end users, as well as analyse and understand the responses in the annual user survey.

Just as with many other open-source projects, the working group is vendor agnostic, as we know that working together will allow us greater reach across the storage industry and help to ensure long-term successful adoption of Ceph in the enterprise.

Learn more on the Ceph Market Development Working Group

For more details on the working group, you can watch the recording of the announcement presentation here, and if you and your organization are interested in joining the working group add your name and email to the wiki here.

Finally, you can find out more about Ubuntu Charmed Ceph here or get in touch.