CIOs have been enamored with the potential of open source software-defined storage since the advent of Ceph. The opportunity to increase hardware flexibility while significantly reducing the costs of data storage fueled early adoption. Those early deployments delivered on that promise of flexibility, but they often came at a cost of management complexity. Since Ceph’s release, Red Hat, and now IBM, have enhanced both the capability and usability of the technology—it features multi-protocol support with block and object protocols, along with security, availability, and data protection services such as object lock, erasure coding, and replication.

The introduction of Storage Ceph as a service potentially transforms what is possible for enterprise organizations. Businesses can harness the cost-effective scale of Ceph (IBM promotes a starting price of $0.026 per GB/month) while offloading the maintenance effort to IBM. For example, IBM handles security and patch management while providing continuous system monitoring, proactive maintenance, and issue resolution.

As businesses enter into an AI-era where data is increasingly valuable, the challenge of budgeting for and managing the scale of data storage will limit the success businesses can achieve. Ultimately, enterprises must re-evaluate their on-premises options for infrastructure. Since its introduction, Ceph has been viewed as an option to reduce the cost of storage. Now that IBM has made Storage Ceph available as a service, its most commonly perceived former “weak spot” has transformed into a strength.