Open Source Software-Defined Storage Platform Ceph Gains Ground

July 29, 2013 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from The Vary Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Ceph, the open source, software-defined storage platform that is contending for its share of the rapidly evolving market for distributed storage systems for the cloud and Big Data, has chalked up a significant victory at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Inktank, the company behind Ceph, partnered with the university’s College of Education to deploy a private cloud powered by Ceph, OpenStack and Ubuntu Linux to support research activities.

Mirantis, an OpenStack systems integrator, collaborated with Inktank in the deployment, which the vendors achieved using existing hardware at the university. The private cloud that they built was designed to make it easy for university faculty to deploy new server instances quickly. The infrastructure also ensured data privacy by storing information on-premise rather than in a public cloud…

The deployment grew out of experimentation that IT staff at the university began on their own. The open source nature of Ceph, OpenStack and other parts of the new cloud appears to have been a major consideration. Stephan Fabel, technical lead at the College of Education, University of Hawaii, reported that "With Ceph, we have unlimited flexibility in our topology. Switching from proprietary systems to open source has been so much more collaborative, enabling us to get much more than we hoped from the initial project." He added, "We really like GPL/LGPL licensing, and we believe that ‘free’ open source means better collaboration."…

Read more from the source @ http://thevarguy.com/cloud-computing-services-and-business-solutions/open-source-software-defined-storage-platform-ceph-g