[Nrsolis]

IMHO, the biggest thing will be that Ceph is now a product that is supported by a huge publicly traded company. That's a big deal and I'll explain why:

Storage is precious data is a big responsibility within most IT orgs. There are lots of regulations and best practices when it comes to protecting, backup up, verifying, and making available business records that are stored digitally. A Fortune 500 company isn't going to trust their business to a home grown solution (think self-supported Ceph compiled from source) when they can pay experts to do that work.

So, in the marketplace, Ceph competes against Scale-IO (now EMC) and Cleversafe. Scale-IO is on CTO radar because it's supported and sold by EMC. Even if Ceph is FREE it doesn't matter because you need support for these products to be actually deployable.

SO...I'm sure that the Inktank acquisition was predicated on a couple of things:

1. Potential customers saying that they liked Ceph but had problems getting it past management because Inktank was too small.

2. RedHat understanding (and verifying) that there is a huge opportunity in storage management and they were tired of getting frozen out by other solutions that were better supported.