CEPH
CANONICAL - THE FULL SPECTRUM OF ENTERPRISE COMPUTE and therefore a legitimate and long-awaited answer to market demand for alternatives to restrictive , proprietary storage solutions .
“ Storage is quite an interesting industry . It ' s kind of hidden ; people don ' t really think about storage until it ' s either too expensive or it ' s not available and , worst case , all your data has been lost ,” says Philip Williams , a Product Leader at Canonical . “ So , it ' s this funny little world that ' s dominated by a number of very large players . The whole aim of the Ceph Foundation is not just to shepherd the upstream projects and this collaborative development work on Ceph itself , but also to demonstrate to enterprise users that there is this viable alternative to the big players , and that their organisations don ' t have to be developer centric to make use of Ceph .”
Open source is the core of everything that happens inside Canonical . “ All of our work is out in the open ; it ’ s free to use , which I think is super important for storage technology , because you can understand what is actually going on inside the system . That ’ s impossible when you ’ re using closed source or proprietary technologies ,” says Philip Williams , Product Leader at Canonical . “ One thing that you see with traditional storage systems from the big players is that their growth is usually around scale up . They ' ll have arbitrary limits on the number of disks you can add to a system .”
With datasets inside every organisation growing larger every day , Williams notes that “ for people with quite significant amounts of data , public cloud and those traditional proprietary storage options typically aren ' t cost effective or feasible .” As a result , Canonical - along with the rest of the Ceph community - is embracing the infinite scalability of Ceph to “ demonstrate to enterprise users that there is this viable alternative to the big players , and that their organisations don ' t have to be developer centric to make use of Ceph .”
Ceph ’ s open source , software defined nature means that organisations looking to deploy it can “ choose any hardware you like , choose any vendor you like - or even no vendor at all - but if you build a Ceph system and you want to switch vendors or run things on your own , you can do that very easily .”
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