CROSS has joined the Ceph Foundation as an associate member. The new foundation’s efforts center around the Ceph unified distributed storage system which provides applications object, block, and file system interfaces in a single unified storage cluster.
The Ceph storage system was developed by UC Santa Cruz alumnus Sage Weil, who turned his Computer Science Ph.D. thesis prototype into a highly successful open-source software project. Dr. Weil later donated a total of $3 million to support research in open-source software at UC Santa Cruz, including a gift and endowment that helped establish CROSS in the Baskin School of Engineering in 2015.
The Linux Foundation announced the creation of the Ceph Foundation at Ceph Day in Berlin, Germany, on November 12, 2018. More than 30 members have already joined, including numerous industry leaders, such as Intel, Red Hat, SUSE, Western Digital, and ZTE. The Ceph Foundation was established as a directed fund under the Linux Foundation.
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, noted during the announcement of the Ceph Foundation’s establishment: “Under the Linux Foundation, the Ceph Foundation will be able to harness investments from a much broader group to help support the infrastructure needed to continue the success and stability of the Ceph ecosystem.” As noted by Sage Weil: “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.”
CROSS is an industry/university collaboration bridging the gap between innovative research prototypes and successful open-source software projects, including projects that are building on Ceph. CROSS Director Carlos Maltzahn: “As a founding member we are pleased to play a part in the Ceph Foundation’s role of strengthening Ceph’s open innovation that both leverages and drives industry engineering and university research.”
