Canonical founder, Mark Shuttleworth, has invested $1,000,000 dollars (€782,000) in Inktank, the only company that provides enterprise-level support for Ceph Distributed Storage System.

Ceph is a solution that combines object storage, block storage, and a POSIX-compatible file system in one unified platform that runs on commodity hardware.

"Ceph redefines storage as an open source service, meeting one of the key challenges for enterprises and cloud providers who need scalable and cost-effective storage," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical.

The OpenStack community and Ceph have strong ties, and the distributed storage system is integrated into the new version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Ceph was integrated into the mainline Linux kernel in 2010.

According to its developers, a large numbers of organizations, developers, and cloud deployments alike are turning to Ceph to scale their storage capacity while decreasing costs.