Red Hat to acquire Inktank

* Red Hat to acquire Inktank
@ 2014-04-30 12:18 Sage Weil
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From: Sage Weil @ 2014-04-30 12:18 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: ceph-devel, ceph-users

Today we are announcing some very big news: Red Hat is acquiring Inktank. 
We are very excited about what this means for Ceph, the community, the 
team, our partners, and our customers. Ceph has come a long way in the ten 
years since the first line of code has been written, particularly over the 
last two years that Inktank has been focused on its development. The fifty 
members of the Inktank team, our partners, and the hundreds of other 
contributors have done amazing work in bringing us to where we are today.

We believe that, as part of Red Hat, the Inktank team will be able to 
build a better quality Ceph storage platform that will benefit the entire 
ecosystem. Red Hat brings a broad base of expertise in building and 
delivering hardened software stacks as well as a wealth of resources that 
will help Ceph become the transformative and ubiquitous storage platform 
that we always believed it could be.

For existing Inktank customers, this is going to mean turning a reliable 
and robust storage system into something that delivers even more value. In 
particular, joining forces with the Red Hat team will improve our ability 
to address problems at all layers of the storage stack, including in the 
kernel. We naturally recognize that many customers and users have built 
platforms based on other Linux distributions. We will continue to support 
these installations while we determine how to provide the best customer 
experience moving forward and how the next iteration of the enterprise 
Ceph product will be structured. In the meantime, our team remains 
committed to keeping Ceph an open, multiplatform project that works in any 
environment where it makes sense, including other Linux distributions and 
non-Linux operating systems.

Red Hat is one of only a handful of companies that I trust to steward the 
Ceph project. When we started Inktank two years ago, our goal was to build 
the business by making Ceph successful as a broad-based, collaborative 
open source project with a vibrant user, developer, and commercial 
community. Red Hat shares this vision. They are passionate about open 
source, and have demonstrated that they are strong and fair stewards with 
other critical projects (like KVM). Red Hat intends to administer the Ceph 
trademark in a manner that protects the ecosystem as a whole and creates a 
level playing field where everyone is held to the same standards of use. 
Similarly, policies like "upstream first" ensure that bug fixes and 
improvements that go into Ceph-derived products are always shared with the 
community to streamline development and benefit all members of the 
ecosystem.

One important change that will take place involves Inktank's product 
strategy, in which some add-on software we have developed is proprietary. 
In contrast, Red Hat favors a pure open source model. That means that 
Calamari, the monitoring and diagnostics tool that Inktank has developed 
as part of the Inktank Ceph Enterprise product, will soon be open sourced.

This is a big step forward for the Ceph community. Very little will change 
on day one as it will take some time to integrate the Inktank business and 
for any significant changes to happen with our engineering activities. 
However, we are very excited about what is coming next for Ceph and are 
looking forward to this new chapter.

I'd like to thank everyone who has helped Ceph get to where we are today: 
the amazing research group at UCSC where it began, DreamHost for 
supporting us for so many years, the incredible Inktank team, and the many 
contributors and users that have helped shape the system. We continue to 
believe that robust, scalable, and completely open storage platforms like 
Ceph will transform a storage industry that is still dominated by 
proprietary systems. Let's make it happen!

sage

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