Intank and SUSE Partner on Big Data Cloud Solution

Inktank, which sells commercial support for the Ceph distributed storage system, has already established some significant partnerships in the open source channel during its brief history. Now it has added SUSE to that list with the announcement of an agreement to provide enterprise Ceph support for SUSE Cloud. Here are the details, and what they mean for Inktank, Big Data and open source.

Intank is a relatively young company, but it has forged some big name partnerships. These include Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS), which since October has bundled Ceph into its CloudPlatform system, as well as Metacloud and Canonical, with which Inktank also announced partnerships last month. Meanwhile, the company also enjoys serious backing from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, who in September bet $1 million of his own money on its success.

Now, Inktank is establishing a foothold in the SUSE world as well by providing support for Ceph within SUSE Cloud, an enterprise cloud platform based on OpenStack. Ceph is already integrated into OpenStack, but the partnership will ensure enterprise-class support services to SUSE customers.

The deal does not appear poised to increase Inktank’s direct exposure to consumers. Instead, SUSE will deliver the actual support to end users, while Inktank “will provide engineering support to SUSE to ensure quick resolution of technical issues,” according to the announcement.

With strong ties to both Canonical and SUSE, Intank now can count two of the open source channel’s three major commercial Linux distributors among its partners. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) remains the odd man out, but I would not be surprised to see a deal between Inktank and Red Hat forthcoming, given the importance of Ceph as a major component of open source solutions for cloud computing and Big Data.

Moreover, Ceph’s future within the open source channel already appears quite assured even independent of the major commercial partnerships that Inktank has been pursuing. The software is being integrated not only into OpenStack but also into the Linux kernel itself, making it an essentially indispensable part of open source enterprise computing.