45Drives to Showcase Next-Generation Ceph Performance Advancements at Community Event

45Drives announced its participation in Ceph Days Raleigh 2026, a community-driven event dedicated to the Ceph distributed storage ecosystem scheduled for March 25th. 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 the next generation of software-defined storage. These conversations align with 45Drives' broader 2026 focus on reducing infrastructure complexity, improving performance economics, and restoring operational control to IT teams as organizations reassess dependence on proprietary enterprise stacks.

This strategic shift is increasingly driven by risk reduction considerations, with recent large-scale outages and security incidents tied to proprietary stacks reinforcing the value of open architectures that reduce blast radius, improve auditability, and allow operators to maintain direct control over patching and system behavior. 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.

The 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, as well as real-world block workloads running inside Proxmox VE virtual machines. Hall emphasized that transparency about performance characteristics is essential for operators making infrastructure decisions at scale, particularly as more teams evaluate open-source infrastructure to escape escalating licensing costs and regain environmental control.

Ceph Days Raleigh will feature presentations spanning recent Ceph project updates, deep technical exploration of performance optimization and emerging hardware technologies such as NVMe storage devices, and practical guidance on running Ceph across multi-site and multi-cluster environments. 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. For more information about 45Drives, visit https://www.45drives.com.