The future of storage

Enterprise storage requirements have grown explosively over the last decade. Research has shown that data in large enterprises is growing at a rate of 40 to 60 percent annually, and many companies are doubling their data footprint each year. IDC analysts estimated that there were 54.4 exabytes of total digital data worldwide in the year 2000. By 2007, this reached 295 exabytes, by 2012 2,596 exabytes, and by the end of 2020 it's expected to reach 40,000 exabytes worldwide

Traditional and proprietary storage solutions often suffer from breathtaking cost, limited scalability and functionality, and vendor lock-in. Each of these factors confounds seamless growth and upgrades for speed and capacity.

Closed source software and proprietary hardware leave one between a rock and a hard place when a product line is discontinued, often requiring a lengthy, costly, and disruptive forklift-style total replacement of EOL deployments.

Modern storage demands a system that is unified, distributed, reliable, highly performant, and most importantly, massively scalable to the exabyte level and beyond. Ceph is a true solution for the world's growing data explosion. A key factor in Ceph's growth and adoption at lightning pace is the vibrant community of users who truly believe in the power of Ceph. Data generation is a never-ending process and we need to evolve storage to accommodate the burgeoning volume.

Ceph is the perfect solution for modern, growing storage: its unified, distributed, cost-effective, and scalable nature is the solution to today's and the future's data storage needs. The open source Linux community saw Ceph's potential as early as 2008, and added support for Ceph into the mainline Linux kernel.