Red Hat Buys InkTank - Paradigms Shift Subtly but Audibly

Last Wednesday brought news of RedHat’s impending acquisition of InkTank, spun out of DreamHost in 2012 to help advance the open source, Linux-resident, cloud-friendly Ceph technology -- earlier originated at DreamHost by Sage Weil (now InkTank’s CTO) based on PhD research Weil did at UC Santa Cruz’ Storage Systems Research laboratory, under sponsorship by the US Department of Energy. Ceph-based scale-out storage is part of the magic underlying  Amazon S3, DropBox and other multi-petabyte-scale cloud storage initiatives. It is, of course, increasingly important to OpenStack users -- Ceph provides REST-accessible object storage under multiple interfaces (including OpenStack’s Swift), block storage (under Cinder, among other abstractions), and in 2014, will introduce a POSIX-compatible file system.  

InkTank provides many practical ways for organizations to use Ceph.  They have their own Ceph distribution (InkTank Ceph Enterprise) packaged as a subscription service with wraparound support, whose pricing reflects total data stored (at >petabyte scales, it costs less than one cent per GB/month). They offer bespoke integration as well as PoC, infrastructure assessment, performance-tuning and other professional services, plus private and ‘InkTank University’ classroom training for developers.

The warmest, and in some ways the most-informative quick-read on InkTank and Ceph came from proud parent, Dreamhost, on April 30, via Marketwired, under the (slightly-giddy) headline “... Open Source Storage Baby Grows Up, Could Probably Beat Up Dad.” Elsewhere, Christopher Tozzi, Jon Benedict (NetApp) and others put forward the sensible point that InkTank’s acquisition works as a hedge with RedHat’s earlier acquisition of Gluster virtual storage, giving RH very deep bench strength in what looks like the global market’s choice for scale-out storage creation and storage hardware commodification. In a practical sense, says the company, Gluster and InkTank are complementary -- the former offering a mature filesystem, while the latter is stronger in object and block storage.

Resources

• Red Hat to acquire Inktank Ceph

• Red Hat | Red Hat to Acquire Inktank, Provider of Ceph

• Wow! Red Hat’s buying Inktank for its Ceph storage smarts — Tech News and Analysis

• Red Hat Boosts Storage Capabilities With Inktank Deal

• Thoughts on Red Hat’s Purchase of Inktank | Captain KVM

• Red Hat Seeks to Bolster OpenStack Position with Inktank Acquisition | The New Stack

• DreamHost Says "Well Done, Son" to Inktank on Acquisition by Red Hat Open Source Storage Baby Grows Up, Could Probably Beat Up Dad

• Red Hat to acquire Inktank - - ITP.net

• Is RedHat thinking about Openstack hyper convergence? - Juku.it - Cloud computing

• Red Hat infrastructure head: Applications to transcend physical deployment models | #RHSummit | SiliconANGLE

• Red Hat Summit 2014 DevOps Round Up: The role of open source in converging business needs | SiliconANGLE

• Red Hat, proving ground for cloud adoption in the enterprise | #Know14 | SiliconANGLE