Mark Shuttleworth Invests $1 Million in Start-Up Inktank

Inktank Storage, Inc., providing enterprise support for the Ceph Distributed Storage System, announced that Canonical Ltd‘s founder Mark Shuttleworth has invested $1 million through a convertible note to help fund the growth of Inktank and support the Ceph community.

In a world where data storage demands continue to grow exponentially and more applications are moving to the cloud, Ceph is the answer for scalable, flexible, and cost-effective storage. The Ceph open source distributed storage system combines object storage, block storage, and a POSIX-compatible file system in one unified platform that runs on commodity hardware, freeing users from restrictive and proprietary storage solutions. Growing numbers of organizations, developers, and cloud deployments alike are turning to Ceph to scale their storage capacity into the future while decreasing costs. In addition, Ceph was integrated into the mainline Linux kernel in 2010.

  As a long-time champion of open source and industry-transforming technologies, Shuttleworth was eager to get involved with the Ceph storage platform and its worldwide community of developers. The Ceph project has been active in the OpenStack community alongside Canonical, and the distributed storage system was integrated into the new version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, released in May 2012. Ubuntu is the popular Linux desktop distribution that was created by Shuttleworth and is backed by Canonical.

"Ceph redefines storage as an open source service, meeting one of the key challenges for enterprises and cloud providers who need scalable and cost-effective storage," said Shuttleworth. "The distinctive architecture of Ceph gives it natural advantages over both proprietary and open source competitors. We found Ceph to be mature enough to warrant its inclusion in Ubuntu 12.10 as a storage option for our OpenStack reference architecture, widely deployed in both telco and corporate environments. I’m also delighted to support the team behind Ceph in their goal of building a commercial success story around this tremendous technology, as an investor in Inktank. Today Ceph is in the Linux kernel and Ubuntu, soon it will be everywhere."

"Mark Shuttleworth is an open source visionary, and the Inktank team is delighted to accept his support for Ceph," said Bryan Bogensberger, President and COO of Inktank. "The demand for Ceph has been extraordinary, and we will use the additional funding to continue Inktank’s accelerated growth to meet the globally expanding needs of those adopting Ceph and operating Ceph storage clusters."

Since launching in May 2012, Inktank has expanded to a second office in Sunnyvale and continues to hire developers, support and services experts, and QA specialist.