Ceph, the Default Choice of Enterprise Storage for Mission Critical Workloads, Expands Yearly Event and Welcomes DigitalOcean as  Newest Member

Open source distributed storage system community demonstrated ecosystem growth at recent Cephalocon event with record-breaking attendance and sponsorships

SAN FRANCISCO - December 19, 2024 - The Ceph Foundation, the global community dedicated to fostering the growth and advancement of Ceph, today announced the completion of a successful Cephalocon 2024 event, which introduced the Ceph New User’s Workshop. 

The Ceph Foundation is also pleased to announce that DigitalOcean has joined as the newest Silver member to help advance open source, distributed storage. 

Ceph continues to be the most popular open source storage solution for modern data storage challenges due to its highly scalable, resilient, and flexible architecture. It’s reached 1 exabyte of storage reported by users in more than 3,000 Ceph clusters across the community, Ceph has solidified its position as the cornerstone of open source data storage. 

A yearly forum for the Ceph community to come together, share knowledge, showcase the latest innovations, and strengthen collaboration across the ecosystem, Cephalocon 2024 just wrapped up. Held onsite at CERN Science Gateway in Geneva, Switzerland, this year’s Cephalocon brought together a record-breaking number of attendees and sponsorships and hosted the first Ceph New User’s Workshop ahead of the main event to help onboard new users and provide a formal introduction to the community. The community also continued its tradition of hosting a Ceph Developer Summit ahead of the main conference as well.  

Highlights from Cephalocon 2024

Cephalocon featured a strong program, with keynote presentations from key members of the community speaking to the value and impact of Ceph:

• CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research, has been involved with Ceph for over ten years and operates a large-scale IT infrastructure with Ceph being a casting stone for storage needs. CERN was delighted to host this year’s Cephalocon at CERN’s flagship visitor and conference center, the Science Gateway. They are eager to continue to nourish and give back to the Ceph community.  
• Clyso is taking Ceph to the next level, working to ensure that Ceph remains competitive with other proprietary storage systems over the coming years. This year, Clyso achieved a groundbreaking milestone by building a Ceph cluster capable of delivering 1 terabyte per second, a feat that sent shockwaves through the storage industry.  
• IBM, which powers  modern enterprise storage, is focused on accelerating Ceph adoption for enterprise workloads, examples include financial services, defense, global enterprises and public sector. Industry trends also indicate emerging use cases for Ceph, which include Cloud native experience on-prem, modern Data lakehouse architectures leveraging RGW, enterprise HA across data centers using RADOS level Stretched cluster, unified cloud-based solutions for object/block/file, easy to consume as-a-service model and S3 Backup solutions.

• Bloomberg has announced it is “all in” with Ceph, and challenged the rest of the community to increase its engagement within all aspects of the Ceph project. Bloomberg is continuing to increase its engagement in the community and continuing to provide an enterprise voice and insight back to the community.

Key growth areas of Cephalocon 2024:

• Sold out event, with 350+ attendees
• Introduction of the Ceph New User’s Workshop, with 48 new users in attendance to collaborate on all things Ceph 
• The Ceph Developer Summit provided a collaborative gathering for Ceph developers to meet each other in person, engage in whiteboarding sessions, and dive deep into technical discussions about the future of Ceph.

Cephalocon is made possible by the generous support of sponsors, including Platinum sponsors Bloomberg Engineering and IBM; Gold sponsors CLYSO and Vultur; and Silver sponsors Canonical and 42ON. 

Session videos from Cephalocon 2024 will be posted to Ceph’s YouTube channel soon.  Stay tuned for information about next year’s Cephalocon event. 

Ceph is honored to welcome DigitalOcean, a scalable cloud and AI platform, at the Silver membership level.

“DigitalOcean is a strong proponent of open source software and innovation, and we are always looking for ways to advance and support the communities of developers of these projects,” said Wade Wegner, Chief Ecosystem and Growth Officer at DigitalOcean. "We look forward to partnering with the Ceph Foundation and supporting the developers and builders responsible for building Ceph as a world-class object storage platform.”

DigitalOcean simplifies cloud computing and AI so that builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. With its mission-critical infrastructure and fully managed offerings, DigitalOcean helps developers at startups and growing digital businesses rapidly build, deploy and scale - whether creating a digital presence or building digital products. DigitalOcean combines the power of simplicity, security, community and customer support so customers can spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time innovating. For more information, visit digitalocean.com.

Ceph continues to drive the future of storage, with technical focus areas  that include consistent performance at scale, ease of use, storage efficiency and expanded protocol support for various use cases. The community  welcomes developers, partners, and technology enthusiasts to get involved. To explore the enhanced benefits of the Ceph Foundation membership, or learn more about the Ceph ecosystem,please visit the Ceph website.

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About the Ceph Foundation 

Ceph is a unified distributed storage system providing applications object, block, and file system interfaces in a single unified storage cluster—making Ceph flexible, reliable and easy for you to manage. Ceph is built on the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS), which provides a highly available and scalable fabric that can either be consumed directly or via higher-level object, block and file services that are built on top. The Ceph Foundation is a directed fund under The Linux Foundation. It provides a neutral home for the Ceph community to collaborate and grow, and is supported by members across multiple industries.