Red Hat Antes Up for Ceph

Inktank purchase gives Red Hat a foothold in the HPC space – and adds to a growing portfolio of cloud products.

Red Hat has announced that it is purchasing Inktank, maintainers of the Ceph distributed storage solution, for $175 million. Red Hat will continue to provide an open source version of Ceph. Inktank also has an enterprise edition of Ceph, with support contracts for customers who will now become Red Hat customers.
Red Hat says it will open source Inktank’s proprietary Calimari monitoring solution, which is used for montiroing Ceph Enterprise clusters. According to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Inktank has “… built an incredibly vibrant community that will continue to be nurtured as we work together to make open source the de facto choice for software-defined networking.”
Inktank’s website states, “Ceph was born because the HPC community needed massively scalable storage without any performance bottlenecks.” This aquisition puts Red Hat in a better position to compete for HPC-related contracts. At the same time, Red Hat’s purchase also heralds the arrival of Ceph as a mainstream tool for enterprise cloud computing. Versions of Ceph are available now for the OpenStack and CloudStack cloud platform. Red Hat adds this latest purchase to their string of recent initiatives in the cloud space.