The Ceph Community, the worldwide collection of developers working to build the popular Ceph software-defined storage project, has announced the formation of an advisory board to assist the community in driving the direction of open source software-defined storage technology. The advisory board launches with the goal of expanding and enhancing community participation and collaboration for the Ceph project, working closely with the community’s technical and user committees.
The charter advisory board includes Ceph community members from global IT organizations that are committed to the Ceph project, including individuals from Canonical, CERN, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk, and SUSE.
With the ability to provide object, block, and file system storage in a single, unified storage cluster, Ceph is well-suited for cloud infrastructures, such as OpenStack. The Ceph Community has grown tremendously over the past several years and, according to the most recent OpenStack Foundation user survey, Ceph is the most popular block storage solution for OpenStack deployments.
Tim Burke, vice president of Infrastructure Engineering Development at Red Hat stated, “Red Hat is all about collaboratively working among communities to accomplish vastly more than any single company could do alone. When we acquired Inktank, Red Hat’s commitment was to maintain the spirit and involvement of a diverse set of contributors in Ceph.
While that collaboration with community and partner members was strong even on an informal basis, the creation of the Ceph advisory board formalises 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 Ceph Community advisory board is the forum for overall Ceph Community participant cooperation and the orchestration of feedback collection and resource allocation. With quarterly meetings and monthly working group meetings, the Ceph Community advisory board will manage the broad issues and opportunities that are critical to the momentum and success of the Ceph software-defined storage project.
“I am enthusiastic about bringing the perspectives and challenges faced by enterprise and cloud service providers to the Ceph community board. We believe that by working with the Ceph community we can help Ceph to deliver performance and functionality for current and the next generations of intelligent storage systems,” said Dan Ferber, Open Source Server Based Storage Technologist, Intel.
“The Ceph project has a unique opportunity to capitalise on the momentum given to us by Red Hat, and the greater Ceph ecosystem, to increase contributions and streamline participation. While the Ceph project has been growing, a participatory governance structure will enable the community to use existing expertise to further mentor, assist and lead the future of storage,” commented Patrick McGarry, Ceph community lead, Red Hat.
