Analyst(s): Camberley Bates
Publication Date: March 6, 2025
On March 4, 2025, IBM announced Ceph as a Service, a managed Storage as a Service offering.
What is Covered in this Article:
- What is announced – Ceph as a Service
- A quick rundown on the offering
- Why now, why Ceph as a Service?
The News: IBM announces Ceph as a Service, a managed, on-premises StaaS offering.
IBM Announces Ceph as a Service – A Managed StaaS Offering
Analyst Take: IBM is releasing Ceph as a Service, a managed, on-premises, StaaS offering. This is essentially an extension of the IBM Cloud Satellite capabilities and reflects so in the quoted 5’9’s availability SLA.
Ceph has been a relatively popular storage offering for files, blocks, and objects in the open-source and container markets. Originally supported through the Red Hat acquisition, Ceph was moved to the IBM Storage engineering team a couple of years ago. Since then, we have seen it come to the market as part of Fusion, an integrated container system, and also as a stand-alone offering.
IBM’s rationale for a managed service is to streamline the management of storage while making it highly easy to deploy and use for developers, a common theme for the open-source market.
Quick Specs of the Offering
The initial offering will provide:
- Block and Object protocols, with File in 2H 2025
- All hardware including top-of-rack networking
- On-demand scaling starting at 100TB
- Complete installation and management along with 24×7 monitoring
- Non-disruptive updates, fixes, and new features
- All encrypted
- 5-9’s SLA and DR options coming in the future
List pricing will start at 2.5 cents per GB for Object, called capacity-tier pricing, and for Block – 10 cents per GB with performance at less than 2ms. There are no egress charges, which if compared to a public cloud offering need to be factored into the total cost. IBM also offers FlashSystem Storage as a Service. This is their premier block offering, which is positioned to meet demands for database and transaction processing versus Ceph, which is for lesser demanding container apps.
Why Now?
Why now, why this space? Red Hat has definitely taken off and is to a certain extent a cloud-native deployment de facto standard. We also see Red Hat OpenShift as the basis for most AI deployments. In many of these installs, Ceph is well considered to be the storage infrastructure. IBM saw a need to bring on-premises Ceph not only as a customer deployment but also to exploit IBM’s management capabilities already in existence. It makes sense, as this does not appear to be a heavy lift of development on their part, but brings a proven offering to market that complements their overall container native strategy.
What to Watch:
- Adoption of integrated or managed service for container-native deployments
- Growth and uptick in Staas as managed or non-managed
- Increasing use of Object for Container Native and AI deployments
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
SuperComputing 2024: A Playground for the Future of Technology
IBM Power: Driving Innovation for Core Workloads with AI and Hybrid Cloud
Author Information
Now retired, Camberley brought over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
