45Drives announced its participation in Ceph Days Raleigh 2026 on March 25th, a community-driven event focused on the Ceph distributed storage ecosystem. As a Diamond-level member of the Ceph Foundation, the company will engage with enterprise organizations, SMBs, and infrastructure teams to discuss active Ceph initiatives, evolving deployment patterns, and performance innovations shaping software-defined storage. This participation aligns with 45Drives' 2026 focus on reducing infrastructure complexity, improving performance economics, and restoring operational control to IT teams as organizations reassess dependence on proprietary enterprise stacks.
The shift toward open architectures is increasingly driven by risk reduction, with recent large-scale outages and security incidents tied to proprietary stacks reinforcing the value of systems that reduce blast radius, improve auditability, and allow operators to maintain direct control over patching and upgrades. By pairing open-source software with purpose-built Storinator hardware, 45Drives enables organizations to build resilient infrastructure designed to fail gracefully rather than catastrophically. Mitch Hall, Chief Architect of 45Drives, will deliver a technical session focused on next-generation Ceph performance, drawing on hands-on benchmarking and real-world operational testing.
Hall's presentation will examine recent advances in erasure coding performance introduced in newer Ceph releases, comparing them against traditional erasure-coded and replicated storage models using identical hardware and network configurations. Evaluation will include synthetic IOPS, latency, and throughput testing, along with real-world block workloads running inside Proxmox VE virtual machines. "Our goal is to clearly quantify where FastEC meaningfully closes the performance gap with replicated storage, and where architectural differences still matter," said Hall. "That transparency is essential for operators making real infrastructure decisions at scale, particularly as more teams evaluate open-source infrastructure to escape escalating licensing costs and regain control over their environments."
Ceph Days Raleigh will feature presentations and discussions spanning recent Ceph project updates, roadmap developments, deep technical exploration of performance optimization, and emerging hardware technologies such as NVMe storage devices. Sessions will also examine integrations with Kubernetes, OpenShift, and OpenStack, alongside operational best practices for deployments ranging from large-scale enterprise environments to edge installations, supported by real-world user stories and production case studies. The event serves as a forum for technical exchange, roadmap visibility, and operational insight across the Ceph ecosystem, bringing together developers, operators, enterprise users, and infrastructure leaders.
For organizations seeking alternatives to proprietary storage solutions, the performance data and practical guidance presented at events like Ceph Days Raleigh provide valuable insights for infrastructure planning. The growing emphasis on open architectures reflects broader industry trends toward reducing vendor lock-in while maintaining reliability and value. More information about 45Drives and its storage solutions is available at https://www.45drives.com, while details about the original announcement can be found at https://www.newmediawire.com.
