Croit delivers strong services for Ceph and DAOS

Croit was founded in 2017 to surf on Ceph success and participates to its adoption. I invited Croit to join the recent IT Press Tour in Berlin end of June. The team truly believes in open source and has a significant Ceph experience with today 23 employees plus a presence in 10 countries over 5 continents. Croit is a founding member of the Ceph Foundation and a member of the Linux Foundation. Recognized as an expert in Ceph complex deployments - Ceph is by design already very modular - Croit added more recently a second hyper scalable open source storage product named DAOS.

Being between end-users and the installed product, the firm offers a variety of services like additional software to master Ceph installation, control and monitoring, but also more classic consulting things, professional services and support. And we understand that Ceph and DAOS can deliver real good services and performance levels if they’re well configured and deployed. The opposite is true and it can turned into a disaster let’s says a nightmare. From an external point of view, it could be seen as a cherry on the cake, but Croit receives an innovator award from Top100 companies in Germany recently ad last year a recognition from Deloitte.

Ceph belongs to the small group of software that invite users to deploy and build infrastructure like hyperscalers at least on the storage side. But the Ceph approach is an open source Lego that also represent a business opportunity for other similar players like SoftIron, Ambedded, Xsky, PetaSAN to list a few or in the past BigTera. BigTera was acquired by Silicon Motion in 2017 and Leander Yu founded in 2020 GRAID Technology.

In terms of go-to-market, Croit partners with a few key vendors and instance like Intel for DAOS, 2CRSi, Supermicro, Seagate, Western Digital or Fujitsu. Te service fee is based on the number of nodes in the configuration and their size.

The team prepares a new core platform, some key developments for DAOS and SaaS and managed service offerings. They also wish to go beyond storage with data movement coupled with computing. Obvious with AI generating tons of data everywhere.