A new chapter for Ceph

I’m really excited to help share the news that The Ceph Foundation has announced the formation of the Ceph Market Development Group, a cross-vendor working team whose purpose is to raise the profile of Ceph amongst enterprise IT decision makers and by so doing, helping them to better understand and evaluate the “Swiss Army Knife” of storage. Being the passionate ambassadors for Ceph that we are, and having built our entire organisation around it, SoftIron is proud to be one of the core members of the group and currently leading the initiative.

Why a market development group?

As marketers and product managers who work with the brilliant engineers and architects that steer and build Ceph – we know how powerful it is and are well versed in the myriad benefits it can bring to all kinds of organization.

We’re also familiar with the expansive, devoted open-source developer community that work tirelessly to contribute to the project, breathing life into this truly game changing technology. The blogs, forums and youtube channels that exist to facilitate these communities are vibrant, engaging and educational – one of the many reasons that Ceph continues to grow from strength to strength, and a motivating example for us in the Ceph Market Development Group.

However, we also empathise with the enterprise IT decision makers who might not be as familiar with Ceph – those whose job it is to efficiently and effectively evaluate storage technology solutions for their organisations. When it’s a challenge for us to distill and convey all of Ceph’s brilliant features and benefits, we recognise that it can also sometimes be bewildering for these folks to take the journey of learning about Ceph, in order to understand how it can specifically solve their challenges.

Finding The Needle In the Haystack

Today’s technology decision makers have it harder than ever, having the responsibility of staying up to date with the thousands of solutions available now – from the stalwarts of storage to the up-and-coming disruptors, all of them promising a revolutionary solution that’s faster, cheaper, simpler. The mountain of content that has to be sought out, sifted through and understood is overwhelming, and the consequences of their decisions can be very costly if ill-informed.

So where do they begin? And more importantly, for those of us in the Ceph game, how do we make sure they’re getting the most useful independent information – designed especially for them to help them evaluate Ceph – not just in the category of ‘open source storage’- but in the much broader category of enterprise storage as a whole?

Enter the Ceph Market Development Group

As mentioned, the group is a cross-vendor team of passionate Ceph advocates who are dedicated to helping enterprise decision makers better understand this next generation technology. We’re here to shine a light on those who are already solving storage challenges using Ceph and empowering their teams to unlock the value of their data.

Why now?

Ceph has come a long way in the almost ten years and sixteen major releases since being created by Sage Weil et al and launched as an open-source project. We know that Ceph was quickly understood by early adopters within the scientific computing sector (the likes of CERN and some forward thinking universities who had the in-house expertise and experience to let Ceph soar), but as enterprise needs have evolved and Ceph’s capabilities have matured its use in more mainstream enterprise applications has exploded.

Yes – Ceph is still complex and powerful, but it’s also come of age, with many high profile enterprise organizations adopting Ceph to underpin their mission-critical infrastructure. Now is the time to help others realise the benefits of its flexibility, scalability and freedom from vendor lock-in.

According to Gartner’s report “The Future of Software-Defined Storage in Data Center, Edge and Hybrid Cloud”, the SDS market is on track to explode over the next few years, making up 50% of the global storage capacity by 2024 (deployed as SDS on-premises or on the public cloud), up from less than 15% in 2019. And, in Red Hat’s “The 2020 State of Enterprise Open Source” report, 95% of respondents claim that Open Source technologies are strategically important to their organization’s overall enterprise infrastructure software strategy.

Ceph’s time is now. There is an exhilarating wave to be caught and we’re here to help make sure it happens. The array of solutions and vendors out there is vast, yet Ceph has earned its place at the top for consideration. With its vibrant open-source community backing it, it’s a top tier, enterprise-class technology that is demonstrating it’s benefits for media & entertainment publishers, ecommerce giants, old guard banking and finance institutes, global MSPs, government entities and more.

Next steps

Together, the Ceph Market Development Group looks forward to doing even more to champion Ceph and put it in front of those who need to know about it, helping them to find it, understand it and evaluate it for their needs, so when they’re ready to make a decision, Ceph is the first choice.

Join us for the last day of Ceph Month, on Thursday, 24th June as we introduce ourselves to the community, and talk about some of the exciting initiatives we have planned. See more here https://pad.ceph.com/p/ceph-month-june-2021

Stay tuned, and if you’d like to get involved, email us at info@softiron.com