New “Inktank Ceph Enterprise” Builds on What Makes Ceph Great
Today Inktank announced the latest offering for their Enterprise Subscription customers, “Inktank Ceph Enterprise.” This release couples the existing power of Ceph with Inktank’s unparalleled support and a monitoring and analytics GUI. Inktank Ceph Enterprise aims to enhance the Ceph experience for enterprise customers using the same underlying APIs, tools, and commands that are available to the Open Source community, packaged in a single SKU for easy purchasing.
Ceph is deeply rooted in Open Source ideals, and one of the main goals of the open source project is to see companies build innovative and revolutionary products with it. A deliberately fragmented copyright ensures that no one can exert undue control over the project, and the LGPL 2 license ensures that proprietary software can comfortably plug in to Ceph at will. This positions Ceph to deliver the perfect mix of freedom and enterprise capability. While there are quite a few products being developed with Ceph as a cornerstone, Inktank Ceph Enterprise is a prime example of the power and flexibility that Ceph’s open design can bring to the enterprise world.
Inktank Ceph Enterprise will include four key elements:
- Ceph for Object and Block: There will be a recommended version of Ceph that will be slightly behind the “latest stable” version of Ceph. This will ensure that enterprise customers using Inktank Ceph Enterprise will have a battle tested, rock solid version of Ceph. In the immediate future this doesn’t include CephFS, but future versions will include it once it reaches the requisite level of maturity.
- Calamari: A cute name for the graphical cluster manager for Ceph that will be included with your Inktank subscription. The initial release focuses on monitoring and performance characteristics of your cluster(s) and was designed specifically to meet the needs of enterprise users.
- Support: SLA-backed technical support from the Ceph experts plus bug prioritization, “hot fixes,” and roadmap input.
- Enterprise Integrations (coming soon!): In addition to the above, Inktank Ceph Enterprise will contain integrations that make it easy to connect your Ceph cluster with existing (usually proprietary) environments, such as Microsoft, VMWare, or legacy platforms.
An important distinction to make is that there is no “proprietary” or “feature enhanced” fork of Ceph itself, steering clear of the sticky issues of the “open core” approach. While Calamari is a separate project and will only be available to Inktank Ceph Enterprise customers, all Inktank work on the Ceph project will continue to be open source and available to anyone who would like to build revolutionary storage products and services.
In a nutshell, Inktank Ceph Enterprise rolls together the inherent power of Ceph, a graphical aggregate of existing management and monitoring APIs, support from the Ceph experts, and (soon to come) powerful plug-n-play connectors to your existing investments. The best part is anyone can build out their own custom solutions just like Inktank has (and several are).
The aim of the Ceph project is to enable an ecosystem of people building appliances, applications, solutions, and other sundry using Ceph as the foundation. It’s important that the power of Ceph is not limited or curtailed in any way. The hope is that Inktank is the first of many companies who invest in Ceph and bring new product offerings to the world.
If you have questions or comments about this latest offering feel free to address them in the comments below or directly to our community team.
scuttlemonkey out
