Inktank Expands Open Source Cloud Partnerships
Close on the heels of a recent agreement with Citrix, the Big Data and storage company Inktank continues to expand its partner network. Its latest deals, with Metacloud and Canonical, promise to enhance its importance in the open source channel as demand for Big Data solutions continues to explode.
As we’ve noted previously, Inktank is a relatively new endeavor. It was created earlier this year to provide commercial support and services for the Ceph open source distributed storage system. And while Ceph itself dates to 2007, it had not been a significant component of any commercial products until Inktank’s announcement last week of a deal for integrating the technology into Citrix’s CloudPlatform system.
Continued Growth
But the Citrix partnership, it seems, was only the beginning of an aggressive strategy by Inktank to expand its channel presence. This week, the company announced two new partnerships, one with private cloud vendor Metacloud and the other with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux.
The agreement with Metacloud will promote the integration of Ceph into the company’s private cloud products, which are based on the open source OpenStack platform. Inktank, meanwhile, will offer support and other services tailored to those deployments.
Similarly, the Canonical partnership involves delivering enterprise services for Ceph for users of Ubuntu. Ceph has enjoyed official support in Ubuntu since the 12.04 release of the operating system in April 2012, and can be quickly deployed on the platform using a Juju Charm. Now, in addition to making it easy to install Ceph on Ubuntu, Canonical can offer its customers complete Ceph support services from Inktank as well.
Both of these partnerships underline the speed at which Inktank appears to be taking off as a commercial venture oriented around a free, open source product. The company is setting an example that organizations elsewhere in the open source channel might wish to follow.
At the same time, this news, and other recent developments at Inktank, speak to the demand for integrating Big Data and cloud technologies within the open source space. The tools for building great open source cloud products are already out there, from Hadoop to OpenStack to Ceph. But opportunities remain for integrating these technologies — and the support services for them that customers need — into more streamlined, accessible products of the kind companies such as Inktank are pushing.
