By: Martin Verges, Co-Founder & CEO of croit GmbH

Imagine looking at your monitor, only to see all your data disappear before your eyes. A few frantic jabs on the keyboard, and the awful truth unfolds: something happened to delete the data, and it can’t be recovered. This is the nightmare that keeps data center executives up at night.

Businesses and organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on data, and for good reason. Tracking consumer behavior generates important insights that can help steer decision-making and grow enterprises. Meanwhile, more and more ventures are finding ways to use AI, which requires veritable oceans of data.

Yet this reliance on data also makes enterprises vulnerable to temporary outages — or worse — and storing it is becoming increasingly expensive. The good news is that there’s now an open-source solution that ensures data resilience while slashing costs.

The many ways data can be at risk

Here’s just a partial list of threats to your data center:

  • Hackers and cybercriminals
  • Disgruntled employees
  • Accidental data deletion or corruption
  • Natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes
  • Fires and floods
  • Break-ins
  • Terrorist attacks and mass shootings
  • Your equipment ages, breaks, or just stops running
  • Your software develops bugs, and data becomes corrupted

All these problems can interfere with your operations and even bring your enterprise to its knees. Being unable to function normally or provide services to customers is not only embarrassing, but can also hurt your bottom line.

The solution is to distribute copies of the data so widely that even if one entire data center gets hit with an EMP, users will still have access to the information they need. If that sounds impossible or expensive, the good news is that there’s now a cost-effective open-source way to do it.

New solutions for protecting your data

The Ceph open-source storage solution has a reputation for being difficult to deploy and manage. While many organizations wanted to use it, they lacked the expertise to adapt it to their own particular needs. Without this know-how, Ceph has been notoriously difficult to work with.

Through the collective efforts of the dedicated Ceph community, however, this storage system is now usable by any enterprise. New software makes Ceph easy and intuitive to manage. No specialized equipment is necessary. Staffing requirements are also minimal, as a single individual with the skill level of a Linux administrator can handle 20 petabytes of data.

If your organization takes off and needs to expand, which requires ever more capacity to store and manage data, today’s Ceph-based management software also makes it easy to scale up. All you have to do is add another node.

Consequently, businesses and organizations of all kinds can start to avail themselves of Ceph’s capabilities without making enormous capital equipment or hiring investments. The software stack installs in five minutes. Rolling upgrades are fast and painless. Since the users’ experience is paramount, they are designed not to cause disruptions for anyone on the network.

If that wasn’t enough, today’s Ceph-based management software makes data more resilient than ever. This fault-tolerant architecture safeguards against data loss by disseminating copies of the information in such a way that service interruptions never occur. Data doesn’t have to be at risk.

Ceph is the cutting-edge of data storage

It’s time to take another look at Ceph storage solutions. Ceph-based management software now allows ventures of all kinds to store, manage, protect, and expand their data to meet their increasing needs. For the most resilient and effective data storage solution, join the Ceph community on the cutting edge.

Martin Verges founded croit GmbH in 2017 to develop innovative, stable, and reliable Ceph-based storage solutions to help businesses scale. Since then he has been building up the company as CEO with robust growth without external financing. In 2022, he also took over the establishment of the US branch of the company and is responsible for its worldwide success. Today croit employs employees and freelancers worldwide and offers excellent follow-the-sun support to its customers. croit GmbH is a founding member of the Ceph Foundation and an active member of the Ceph community.