Inktank Storage was the lead development contributor and financial sponsor company behind the open source Ceph distributed file system. Inktank was founded by

Sage Weil Sage Weil (born March 17, 1978) is the founder and chief architect of Ceph, a distributed storage platform. He also was the creator of WebRing, a co-founder of Los Angeles-based hosting company DreamHost, and the founder and CTO of Inktank. We ...

and Bryan Bogensberger and initially funded by

DreamHost DreamHost is a Los Angeles-based web hosting provider and domain name registrar. It is owned by New Dream Network, LLC, founded in 1996 by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd College ...

Citrix Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. C ...

and

Mark Shuttleworth Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the development of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. In 2002, Shuttleworth became ...

. On 30 April 2014 it was announced that

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

would acquire Inktank Storage for $175 Million.

History

Inktank was created to offer professional services and support for the open source Ceph storage system. CTO and founder Sage Weil started the open source Ceph project in 2004 for his

doctoral dissertation A thesis ( : theses), or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings.International Standard ISO 7144: ...

at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California syste ...

. In August 2012, Inktank joined the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additi ...

to further open source technologies such as Ceph. In September 2012, Mark Shuttleworth invested 1 million dollars to help support the progression of Ceph.

Coverage

In July 2012, Inktank was listed in the Infostor 6 Storage Startups to Watch. In July 2012, Inktank was listed in CRN The 10 Coolest Storage Startups of 2012. In May 2012, Inktank was listed in CRN 10 Hot Emerging Vendors.

References

{{Red Hat Companies established in 2011 Computer storage companies Red Hat