Distributed Storage 2026. A (controversial) technical guide

Another year alive, another year of watching the distributed storage industry outdo itself in commercial creativity. If 2024 was the year everyone discovered they needed “storage for AI” (spoiler: it’s the same old storage, but with better marketing), 2025 has been the year MinIO decided to publicly immolate itself while the rest of the ecosystem continues to evolve apace.

Hold on, the curves are coming.

The drama of the year: MinIO goes into “maintenance mode” (read: abandonment mode).

If you haven’t been following the MinIO soap opera, let me give you some context. MinIO was the open source object storage that everyone was deploying. Simple, fast, S3 compatible. You had it up and running in 15 minutes. It was the WordPress of object storage.

Well, in December 2025, a silent commit in the README changed everything: “This project is currently under maintenance and is not accepting new changes.” No announcement. No migration guide. No farewell. Just a commit and good bye.

The community, predictably, went up in flames. One developer summed it up perfectly: “A silent README update just ended the era of MinIO as the default open-source S3 engine.”

But this didn’t come out of the blue. MinIO had been pursuing an “open source but don’t overdo it” strategy for years:

2021: Silent switch from Apache 2.0 to AGPL v3 (no announcement, no PR, no nothing)
2022-2023: Aggressive campaigns against Nutanix and Weka for “license violations”.
February 2025: Web console, bucket management and replication removed from the Community version
October 2025: Stop distributing Docker images
December 2025: Maintenance mode

The message is clear: if you want MinIO for real, pay up. Their enterprise AIStor product starts at €96,000/year for 400 TiB. For 1 PB, we are talking about more than €244,000/year.

The lesson? In 2025, “Open Source” without Open Governance is worthless. MinIO was a company with an open source product, not a community project. The difference matters.

In the meantime, Ceph continues to swim peacefully.

While MinIO was self-destructing, Ceph was celebrating its 20th stable release: Tentacle (v20.2.0), released in November 2025. The project accumulates more than 1 exabyte of storage deployed globally on more than 3,000 clusters.

The most interesting thing about Tentacle is FastEC (Fast Erasure Coding), which improves the performance of small reads and writes by 2x to 3x. This makes erasure coding finally viable for workloads that are not pure cold file. With a 6+2 EC profile, you can now achieve approximately 50% of the performance of replication 3 while using only 33% of the space.

For those of us who have been hearing “erasure coding is slow for production” for years, this is a real game changer.

Other Tentacle news:

Integrated SMB support via Samba Manager
NVMe/TCP gateway groups with multi-namespace support
OAuth 2.0 authentication on the dashboard
CephFS case-insensitive directories (finally)
ISA-L replaces Jerasure (which was abandoned)

The Crimson OSD (based on Seastar for NVMe optimization) is still in technical preview. It is not production ready, but the roadmap is promising.

The numbers that matter

Bloomberg operates more than 100 PBs in Ceph clusters. They are a Diamond member of the Ceph Foundation and their Head of Storage Engineering is on the Governing Board. DigitalOcean has 54+ PBs in 37 production clusters. CERN maintains 50+ PBs in more than 10 clusters.

And here’s the interesting part: ZTE Corporation is among the top 3 global contributors to Ceph and number 1 in China. Its TECS CloveStorage product (based on Ceph) is deployed in more than 320 NFV projects worldwide, including China Mobile, izzi Telecom (Mexico) and Deutsche Telekom.

The telco sector is Ceph’s secret superpower. While many are still thinking of traditional appliances, telcos are running Ceph in production on a massive scale.

The enterprise ecosystem: understanding what you are buying

This is where it gets interesting. And it’s worth understanding what’s behind each option.

IBM Fusion: two flavors for different needs

IBM has two products under the Fusion brand, and it is important to understand the difference:

IBM Fusion HCI: Uses IBM Storage Scale ECE (the old GPFS/Spectrum Scale). Parallel file system with distributed erasure coding. Hyperconverged appliance that scales from 6 to 20 nodes.
IBM Fusion SDS: Uses OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF), which is based on Ceph packaged by Red Hat.

Storage Scale is a genuinely differentiated technology, especially for HPC. Its parallel file system architecture offers capabilities that Ceph simply doesn’t have: advanced metadata management, integrated tiering, AFM for federation…. If you have high-performance computing, supercomputing or AI workloads at serious scale, Storage Scale has solid technical arguments to justify it.

IBM Fusion HCI performance claims are impressive: 90x acceleration on S3 queries with local caching, performance equivalent to Databricks Photon at 60% of the cost, etc.

Now, it’s always worth asking the question: how much of that performance is proprietary technology and how much is simply well-dimensioned hardware with an appropriate configuration? It’s not a criticism, it’s a legitimate question that any architect should ask before making a decision.

In the case of Fusion SDS, you’re buying Ceph with the added value of packaging, OpenShift integration, and IBM enterprise support. For many organizations, that has real value.

Red Hat Ceph Storage: the enterprise standard

Red Hat Ceph Storage continues to be the enterprise distribution of choice. They offer 36 months of production support plus optional 24 months of extended support. The product is robust and well integrated.

What you are really buying is:

Tested and certified packages
24/7 enterprise support
Predictable life cycles
OpenShift integration

Is it worth it? It depends on your context. If your organization needs a support contract to comply with compliance or simply to sleep easy, probably yes. And we’d be happy to help you with that. But if you have the technical team to operate Ceph upstream, it’s a decision that deserves analysis.

SUSE: a lesson in vendor lock-in

Here’s a story that bears reflection: SUSE completely exited the Ceph enterprise market. Their SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) product reached end of support in January 2023. After acquiring Rancher Labs in 2020, they pivoted to Longhorn for Kubernetes-native storage.

If you were an SES customer, you found yourself orphaned. Your options were to migrate to Red Hat Ceph Storage, Canonical Charmed Ceph, community Ceph, or find a specialized partner to help you with the transition.

This is not a criticism of SUSE; companies pivot according to their strategy. But it is a reminder that control over your infrastructure has value that doesn’t always show up in TCO.

Pure Storage and NetApp: the appliance approach

Pure Storage has created a category called “Unified Fast File and Object” (UFFO) with its FlashBlade family. Impressive hardware, consistent performance, polished user experience. Its FlashBlade//S R2 scales up to 60 PB per cluster with 150 TB DirectFlash Modules.

NetApp StorageGRID 12.0 focuses on AI with 20x throughput improvements via advanced caching and support for more than 600 billion objects in a single cluster.

Both are solid solutions that compete with Ceph RGW in S3-compatible object storage. The performance is excellent. The question each organization must ask itself is whether the premium justifies the vendor lock-in for their specific use case.

The question no one asks: what are you really buying?

This is where I put on my thoughtful engineer’s hat.

Ceph upstream is extremely stable. It has 20 releases under its belt. The Ceph Foundation includes IBM, Red Hat, Bloomberg, DigitalOcean, OVHcloud and dozens more. Development is active, the community is strong, and documentation is extensive.

So when does it make sense to pay for enterprise distribution and when does it not?

It makes sense when:

Your organization requires a compliance support contract or internal policy
You don’t have the technical staff to operate Ceph and you don’t want to develop it.
You need predictable and tested upgrade cycles.
The cost of downtime is higher than the cost of the license.
Need specific integration with other vendor products

It deserves further analysis when:

The decision is based on “it’s what everyone does.”
No one has really evaluated the alternatives
The main reason is that “the vendor told us that open source is not supported”.
You have capable technical equipment but have not invested in their training.

The real challenge is knowledge. Ceph has a steep learning curve. Designing a cluster correctly, understanding CRUSH maps, tuning BlueStore, optimizing placement groups… this requires serious training and hands-on experience.

But once you have that knowledge, you have options. You can choose an enterprise vendor judiciously, knowing exactly what value-add you are buying. Or you can operate upstream with specialized support. The key is to make an informed decision.

Demystifying marketing claims

One thing I always recommend is to read benchmarks and marketing claims with a constructive critical spirit.

“Our product is 90x faster” – Compared to what baseline? On what specific workload? With what competitor configuration?

“Performance equivalent to [competitor] at 60% of cost” – Does this include full TCO? Licensing, support, training, personnel?

“Enterprise-grade certified solution” – what exactly does that mean? Because Ceph upstream is also enterprise-grade at CERN, Bloomberg, and hundreds of telecoms.

I’m not saying the claims are false. I am saying that context matters. The reality is that distributed storage performance is highly dependent on:

Correct cluster design (failure domains, placement groups)
Appropriate hardware (25/100GbE network, NVMe with power-loss protection)
Operating system configuration (IOMMU, CPU governors)
Workload specific tuning (osd_memory_target, bluestore settings)

A well-designed Ceph cluster operated by experienced people can achieve impressive performance. The Clyso benchmark achieved 1 TiB/s with 68 Dell PowerEdge servers. IBM demonstrated over 450,000 IOPS on a 4-node Ceph cluster with 24 NVMe per node.

Sometimes, that “certified solution” seal you see on a datasheet is, at heart, free software with an expert configuration, well-dimensioned hardware, and a lot of testing. Which has value, but it’s good to know.

The smart move: deciding with information

After 15 years in this industry, my conclusion is that there is no single answer. What there is are informed decisions.

For some organizations, a packaged enterprise solution is exactly what they need: guaranteed support, predictable cycle times, validated integration, and the peace of mind of having an accountable vendor. IBM Fusion with Storage Scale is an excellent choice for HPC. Red Hat Ceph Storage is solid for anyone who wants Ceph with enterprise backup.

For other organizations, Ceph upstream with specialized support and training offers significant advantages:

Governance of foundation: Ceph is a project of the Linux Foundation with open governance. MinIO can’t happen.
Active community: Thousands of contributors, regular releases, bugs fixed quickly.
Flexibility: It’s your cluster, your configuration. If tomorrow you decide to change your support partner, you lose nothing.
Transparent TCO: The software is free. You invest in appropriate hardware and knowledge.
Version control: You update when it makes sense for you, not when the vendor puts out the next packaged release.

The common denominator in both cases is knowledge. Whether you buy an enterprise solution or deploy upstream, understanding Ceph in depth allows you to make better decisions, negotiate better with vendors, and solve problems faster.

Where to get this knowledge?

Ceph is complex. But there are clear paths:

The official documentation is extensive and much improved. The Ceph blog has excellent technical deep-dives.

Cephalocon is the annual conference where you can learn from those who operate Ceph at full scale (Bloomberg, CERN, DigitalOcean).

Structured training with hands-on labs is the most efficient way to build real competence. You don’t learn Ceph by reading slides; you learn by breaking and fixing clusters.

L3 technical support from people who live Ceph every day gets you out of trouble when things get complicated in production. Because they will. At SIXE, we’ve spent years training technical teams in Ceph and providing L3 support to organizations of all types: those operating upstream, those using enterprise distributions, and those evaluating options. Our Ceph training program covers everything from basic architecture to advanced operations with real hands-on labs. And if you already have Ceph in production and need real technical support, our specialized technical support is designed for exactly that.

In addition, we have just launched a certification program with badges in Credly so that your team can demonstrate their competencies in a tangible way. Because in this industry, “be Ceph” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

Conclusions for 2026

MinIO is dead for serious use. Look for alternatives. Ceph RGW, SeaweedFS, or even the OpenMaxIO fork if you are brave.
Understand what you are buying. There are cases where a packaged enterprise solution brings real value. There are others where you are mainly paying for a logo and a configuration that you could replicate.
Ceph upstream is mature and production-ready. Bloomberg, DigitalOcean, CERN and 320+ telecoms projects can’t all be wrong.
The true cost of distributed storage is knowledge. Invest in quality training and support, regardless of which option you choose.
Control over your infrastructure has value. Ask SUSE SES customers how it went when the vendor decided to pivot.
The governance of the project matters as much as the technology. Open Foundation > company with open source product.

2026 looks interesting. FastEC is going to change the erasure coding equation. Integration with AI and ML will continue to push for more performance. And the vendor ecosystem will continue to evolve with proposals that deserve serious evaluation.

You decide. This is the only important thing.