Ceph Open Source Storage Powers Red Hat and SanDisk Partnership

Open source distributed storage is bringing Red Hat (RHT) and SanDisk (SNDK) together. The companies announced a partnership this week to deliver an integrated storage solution based on Ceph, the scale-out storage platform.

Ceph is an open source storage platform designed for building file systems that stretch across a number of servers. Developed by Inktank, it came under Red Hat’s direction when Red Hat acquired Inktank in 2014.

Red Hat subsequently developed an enterprise storage platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, which combined Ceph with the company’s GNU/Linux distribution. But Red Hat hadn’t done much else with the product until it announced the SanDisk partnership this week, which represents the company’s first big channel play surrounding Ceph.

Through the partnership, SanDisk will offer Red Hat’s Ceph product as part of the SanDisk InfiniFlash storage system. The goal is to provide a high-performance storage solution that works with commodity hardware — which is exactly what Ceph is designed to do.

“The combination of open, software-defined storage from Red Hat and flash storage from SanDisk enables companies to serve a broad set of workloads with more tightly integrated, high-performing storage that scales,” Red Hat says.

The news builds upon SanDisk’s efforts to increase its engagement with the open source ecosystem. The company, which has previously not had a major presence in the open source space, announced contributions to the Ceph project last March.

The takeaway for the channel is that open source storage solutions designed for clusters and the cloud are now entering primetime, with big-name enterprise support backing them up. Ceph still has a ways to go to become the dominant storage platform in this market, but the Red Hat and SanDisk partnership suggests it is gaining ground.