Inktank has raised $1 million in the form of a convertible note from Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth to further services play for Ceph — an open source, next-generation, distributed storage technology.

Inktank is led by DreamHost Co-Founder Sage Weil, who formed the company after developing Ceph over the past several years, starting with his work at the University of Caliornia, Santa Cruz.

Ceph is known for its capability to deliver object storage, block storage, and file storage in one unified platform that runs on commodity hardware. Inktank’s goal is to build a worldwide developer community to help support the service inside enterprise organizations.

Shuttleworth’s interest in Ceph stems in part from the storage technology’s significance in the OpenStack community, which Canonical also plays a major role in. Canonical, which manages Ubuntu, has included Ceph as a storage option in the Ubuntu 12.10 release. Ceph was also added to the Linux kernel in 2010. DreamHost is also an active member of OpenStack. OpenStack is a cloud-building effort that is considered one of the fastest-growing open source projects of all time.

Inktank launched earlier this year. Ahead of the launch, the 451 Group published a report about Ceph. They concluded that the technology is gaining support, but it is not yet available on the Windows platform.

The 451 Group notes that there is a need for alternatives to Amazon Web Services S3 and Elastic Block Store cloud storage services. Service providers and enterprises are looking to build out their own offerings, which bodes well for systems such as Ceph.

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