Open source storage gets a boost today as the Linux Foundation launches the Ceph Foundation with more than 30 members including China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, and Red Hat.

The Ceph project is a unified distributed storage system providing applications with object, block, and file system interfaces. It was co-founded more than a decade ago by Sage Weil, who is now chief architect at Red Hat for Ceph, and University of California, Santa Cruz professor Carlos Maltzahn. A whole team of storage engineers now manage and maintain the open source code.

Ceph users include cloud service providers such as Rackspace and Linode, telecommunications infrastructure providers like Deutsche Telekom, software companies including SAP and Salesforce, and other major enterprises such as Cisco, BMW, Fidelity, and Bloomberg.

Object storage, which is typically used in the cloud, is the preferred storage option for unstructured data like video, audio, and social media postings, as well as big data, analytics, sensors and large-scale IoT workloads. Unstructured data makes up 80 percent or more of enterprise data and is growing at the rate of 55 percent to 65 percent per year.

Meanwhile, block and file storage remain critical to any IT infrastructure organization and are key components of infrastructure platforms like OpenStack and Kubernetes.

As companies’ data volumes explode, having a way to manage these disparate file types and provide scale-out storage through a single pane of glass becomes increasingly important.

In addition to providing this type of scale-out storage, Ceph also lowers the cost of storing enterprise information in the private cloud, according to Red Hat, which uses Ceph storage in its OpenStack-based cloud stack.

According to recent user surveys, about two-thirds of OpenStack clouds use Ceph block storage. This includes OVH’s newly launched public cloud.

Rook, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s first storage project, also uses Ceph to bring file, block, and object storage into the Kubernetes cluster.

The new Ceph Foundation will support the open source community by organizing and distributing financial contributions to boost adoption, training, and in-person collaboration across the Ceph ecosystem.

Founding Premier members of the Ceph Foundation include Amihan, Canonical, China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, ProphetStor Data Services, Red Hat, SoftIron, SUSE, Western Digital, XSKY Data Technology, and ZTE. General members include Ambedded Technology, Arm, Catalyst Cloud, Croit GmbH, EasyStack, Intelligent Systems Services, Pingan Technology, QCT, Sinorail, and Xiaoju Science Technology.

“A guiding vision for Ceph is to be the state of the art for reliable, scale-out storage, and to do so with 100 percent open source,” said Sage Weil, Ceph co-creator, project leader, and chief architect at Red Hat for Ceph. “While early public cloud providers popularized self-service storage infrastructure, Ceph brings the same set of capabilities to service providers, enterprises, and individuals alike. Today’s launch of the Ceph Foundation is a testament to the strength of a diverse open source community coming together to address the explosive growth in data storage and services.”