45Drives, a global leader in open-source data storage solutions for enterprise and SMB environments, announced its participation in Ceph Days Raleigh 2026 on March 25th. The event serves as a key community-driven forum for the Ceph distributed storage ecosystem, bringing together developers, operators, enterprise users, and infrastructure leaders for technical exchange and operational insight. As a Diamond-level member of the Ceph Foundation, 45Drives brings a unique perspective and leadership role to the event, underscoring its commitment to advancing high-performance, open-source storage at scale.
The company will engage with enterprise organizations, SMBs, and local North Carolina infrastructure teams to discuss active and upcoming Ceph initiatives, evolving deployment patterns, and performance innovations shaping the next generation of software-defined storage. These conversations align with 45Drives' broader 2026 thought leadership 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. Recent large-scale outages and security incidents tied to tightly coupled proprietary stacks have reinforced the value of open architectures that reduce blast radius, improve auditability, and allow operators to maintain direct control over patching, upgrade cadence, and system behavior. By pairing open-source software with purpose-built, high-density 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 the newer Ceph tentacle release, comparing it 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.
"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 kind of transparency is essential for operators making real infrastructure decisions at scale, particularly as more teams evaluate open-source infrastructure as a way to escape escalating licensing costs and regain control over their environments."
Ceph Days Raleigh will feature a full day of presentations and discussions spanning recent Ceph project updates and roadmap developments, 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 and smaller installations, supported by real-world user stories and production case studies.
Key event milestones include the opening of registration and the call for papers on February 16, 2026, followed by speaker notifications on February 27, 2026, and the publication of the full event schedule on March 6, 2026. For more information about 45Drives and its participation in Ceph Days Raleigh 2026, visit https://www.45drives.com.
