Developers behind the open source massively scalable distributed storage system known as Ceph have started a company called Inktank to commercialize the stuff.

It's supposed to be the first company to offer enterprise-level support and services for Ceph.

They claim Ceph is the "future of storage," a self-managing, highly scalable, open source distributed storage system that delivers object storage, block storage and POSIX-compatible file storage in a unified platform that runs on commodity hardware.

Sage Weil, who created the Ceph project for his doctoral dissertation at UC Santa Cruz in 2004, will be Inktank's CEO and chief architect.

Ceph has been part of the Linux kernel for the last two years or so and it's been integrated into OpenStack.

It's unclear what Inktank's using for money but it says it's hiring.

Former Joyent marketing VP Bryan Bogensberger is now president and COO of Inktank although his LinkedIn profile also has him down as VP of business strategy at DreamHost, the web hosting branch of New Dream Network LLC started in 1996 by Weil among others.

In a statement Bogensberger remarks that enterprise adoption of Ceph has been held back for lack of professional support.

Piston Cloud Computing was an early adopter of Ceph and is using it as the block storage device for its OpenStack-based Piston Enterprise OS distribution, but apparently wishes it didn't have to do the heavy lifting to get it fully integrated.

Ceph promises lower storage costs, increased operational flexibility and freedom from "restrictive and expensive proprietary storage systems."

The platform is reportedly capable of auto-scaling to the exabyte level and beyond and has no single point of failure. It can be installed and used in public or private clouds.