294% Growth in Customers for Inktank

Inktank Storage Inc., the company delivering Ceph – the massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system – announced a 294% growth in customers over 2013.

Fueled by demand for Ceph-based OpenStack storage solutions and an expanding list of OEM and reseller partnerships, this growth is evidence of Ceph’s momentum and demonstrates the value of Inktank’s enterprise products and services.

Ceph adoption increased sharply in 2013, as it became the de-facto storage platform for service providers and enterprises deploying public or private clouds, particularly alongside OpenStack. In October, the OpenStack User Survey revealed Ceph as the most popular option for distributed block storage amongst OpenStack users, who are increasingly turning to Inktank for enterprise solutions. Innovative technology, financial, telecommunications, and academic organizations are among those that joined growing customer list in 2013.

Product Highlights
In October, Inktank announced its Ceph Enterprise. Building on Ceph’s open-source heritage, it is a subscription offering that combines the most stable version of Ceph for object and block storage with a new graphical manager and a suite of support services. Over the past year, Inktank has participated in the Ceph project’s Cuttlefish, Dumpling, and Emperor releases, contributing major features like multi-region object storage, a monitoring and management API, and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Ceph Community
Thanks in part to Inktank’s participation, the Ceph open-source community was vibrant and thriving in 2013, growing its pool of authors from 130 to 203 while accepting major contributions from companies including Intel, SUSE, and CloudWatt. In addition, the community held its inaugural Ceph Developer Summit, where developers from around the world met virtually to discuss the future of Ceph, and organized the first Ceph Days, in-person events in New York, NY, Santa Clara, CA, and London, UK, for education and idea exchange.

Partner Ecosystem
Inktank cultivated its growing portfolio of partners over the last twelve months, integrating key technologies into its ecosystem.

New partners include:

• Canonical Ltd., the company behind the Ubuntu project, joined with Inktank to offer a fully integrated and supported implementation of Ceph in Ubuntu 13.04 for enterprises requiring a sophisticated and transformative storage option.
• Penguin Computing, Inc., which delivers Linux-based solutions for the enterprise, partnered with Inktank and Caldexa to deliver a highly efficient, large-scale cloud storage solution with Ceph storage and Penguin’s power-efficient UDX1.
• Citrix Systems, Inc., which leverages virtualization and networking technologies to deliver high-performance, elastic and cost-effective cloud services, partnered with Inktank to deliver enterprise storage solutions alongside Apache CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform.

Inktank deepened relationships with existing partners in 2013 as well, working with Dell, Inc.www.dell.com on a massive private cloud solution for the University of Alabama at Birmingham and collaborating with Mirantis, Inc., the largest OpenStack systems integrator, to deploy private cloud infrastructure for the University of Hawaii at Manoa College of Education. Inktank also continued its close work with Europe-based OpenStack service providers hastexo Professional Services GmbH and eNovance.

“Inktank had a great year in 2013, one that marked a crucial turning point for us as a company,” said Bryan Bogensberger, Inktank CEO. “The unveiling of our flagship product, Inktank Ceph Enterprise, was the result of our evolution into a true enterprise product organization. While Ceph gains momentum at an impressive rate, we remain uniquely poised to bring its transformative power to businesses of all kinds. For Inktank, 2014 will be another record-breaking year as we continue to enhance our cutting-edge suite of products and services in response to our customers’ and prospects’ needs.”