Blink your eyes and five years have gone by. That’s my feeling as I posed questions to Ross Turk (pictured below), VP of Community at Inktank.
I first interviewed him almost five years ago, at an event in San Jose, when he was with SourceForge. Since that time, the entire cloud computing revolution went into full-launch mode, with Inktank’s focus on massive distributed storage along with it.
Inktank and Ross were at the recent Red Had Summit, which seemed like a great opportunity to re-visit his thoughts. Here’s what I asked him and what he had to say.
Roger: What sort of scale do your customers face?
Ross: Deployments in the 3-5PB range are common, and larger ones are slowly coming online. In 2014, we plan to see regular deployments in the 10PB range.
Through Inktank Ceph Enterprise, we aim to deliver massively scalable storage that runs on commodity hardware, radically improving storage economics and easing the costs of managing exponential enterprise data growth.
Because Ceph contains no single point of failure and is built using only scale-out components, there is no theoretical limit to the deployment size. And because our solution is based on open source, it frees enterprises from vendor lock-in, providing the flexibility and scalability necessary to keep up with evolving storage needs.
Roger: What problems are InkTank and Ceph designed to solve?
Ross: Traditional storage solutions typically are built using costly and restrictive proprietary hardware, requiring enterprises with vast amounts of data to invest heavily. But they are also restrictive, often tying enterprises to a single vendor and reducing their ability to adapt to changing storage demands.
Roger: What are the keys to your relationship with Red Hat? What do each of the companies contribute to one another?
Ross: Our relationship with Red Hat is critical to us; as we work to bring the power of Ceph into the enterprise, more and more of our customers are demanding tight interoperability with technologies in the Red Hat ecosystem, and their customers are increasingly requesting Ceph-based solutions.
Inktank Ceph Enterprise is certified to provide storage for RHEL-OSP, Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution, and RHEV, Red Hat’s enterprise virtualization product. Our relationship is necessary to deliver and support the fully-integrated solutions our customers are asking for!