(gigaom.com) -- The software-defined storage system Ceph has been gaining a lot of traction in the OpenStack world recently, and here’s another validating step: Ubuntu sponsor company Canonical has struck a deal with Ceph firm Inktank, allowing paying enterprise Ubuntu users to get full support for Ceph as part of the package.
In a sense, it’s about time this happened. Ubuntu rival SUSE has been offering enterprise-level support for Ceph since November last year, as part of its SUSE Cloud OpenStack distribution. And Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth invested $1 million in Inktank a few months before that.
Still, better late than never: Ubuntu is a – if not the – leading OpenStack distro, and Ceph has been integrated with it for some time, so plenty of users will find this useful. According to the companies, Ubuntu Advantage subscribers will be able to get support for Ceph from both Canonical and Inktank.
Enterprise customers will of course mostly be dealing with a long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu, so the focus here is on version 12.04, but other releases will be supported for 18-month periods as opposed to 5 years. So those paying customers who are playing with the Ubuntu 13.04 interim release, which is more tightly aligned with OpenStack than ever before, should also find their support needs met.
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