In January 2017, the trio of Martin Verges, Matthias Grandl, and Paul Emmerich founded croit GmbH with the goal of bringing the extensive knowledge of more than 5 years (now more than 10) of Ceph operation into a software solution, so that other companies and administrators are enabled to use Ceph in a stable and reliable way. As a founding member of the Ceph Foundation and an active member of the Ceph community, croit has the knowledge and experience needed to help enterprises navigate the complexities of the Ceph landscape.

How croit for Ceph helps make the Ceph platform more intuitive

Ceph is an open-source storage platform that uses a distributed cluster formation to provide object storage, block storage, and file storage. “Ceph provides a highly-scalable, very low-cost general-purpose object, file, and block storage solution that supports every virtualization platform, including Kubernetes,” explains Verges.

The signature product of croit is croit for Ceph, a software appliance that provides software-defined storage including the croit management software, Linux operating system, and Ceph storage system. For users, croit provides the management system for Linux and Ceph, simplifying storage installation, upgrades, and management.

One of the main benefits of working with croit for an organization’s Ceph needs is the superior, easier-to-use user interface that the platform offers. Through croit, users can install and manage the software stack needed for a fully functional storage system, including pre-validated and pre-approved versions of the Linux operating system and Ceph which are known to produce trouble-free installations.

This software can be installed in mere minutes — even on bare metal servers — updates automatically without any disruption to the application, and can manage up to 20 Petabytes with just one Linux administrator.

Why choose croit for Ceph

When it comes to data storage, one of the obvious primary concerns users face is potential data loss. The croit platform manages clusters using the methods of data replication and data erasure, which can help avoid or entirely eliminate data loss. Replication is best for higher performance requirements, while erasure coding is best for the lowest cost.

“With a properly designed croit Ceph cluster, it is nearly impossible to lose data,” Verges asserts. “It is arguably the most resilient storage architecture available, which is why CERN and Bloomberg, for example, use Ceph for mission-critical data.”

Many users are surprised by how affordable Ceph’s storage solutions are — particularly when delivered by croit. It’s worth noting that Ceph does not require any special hardware for use. Indeed, it is most effective when hardware is not specialized, meaning each server is a replaceable, low-cost unit that makes it easy to replace them seamlessly as necessary. Because of this, croit Ceph can provide a storage solution at a cost well below what most commercial storage solutions can provide, sometimes just a fraction of a penny per GB per month amortized across 36 to 60 months.

The future of croit for Ceph

Since its formation in Europe, croit has already expanded its service rapidly across the continent. Verges hopes this expansion will continue to North America and around the world.

“The world is at an inflection point where data growth is overwhelming, and the cost of all that data is rising,” Verges explains. “This has created an urgent need for lower cost general storage solutions for everything from huge archives to massive data lakes for AI/ML workloads.”

At this point, Ceph has matured to the point where it is an ideal general-purpose, multi-protocol, highly-scalable, reliable storage solution. “All that Ceph lacks is an easy management framework to manage its complexity,” Verges concludes, “ and croit is the answer to that gap, making Ceph simple and easy for any enterprise.”