45Drives, a global leader in open-source data storage solutions, announced its participation in Ceph Days Raleigh 2026 on March 25th, where it will highlight next-generation Ceph performance for enterprise and SMB users. As a Diamond-level member of the Ceph Foundation, the company's involvement underscores its commitment to advancing high-performance, open-source storage at scale while collaborating with partners and users.
The event serves as a forum for technical exchange and operational insight across the Ceph ecosystem, bringing together developers, operators, and infrastructure leaders. 45Drives will engage with organizations to discuss active Ceph initiatives, deployment patterns, and performance innovations shaping software-defined storage. This aligns with the company's 2026 focus on reducing infrastructure complexity, improving performance economics, and restoring operational control to IT teams as organizations reassess dependence on proprietary enterprise stacks.
Recent large-scale outages and security incidents tied to proprietary stacks have reinforced the value of open architectures that reduce blast radius, improve auditability, and allow direct control over patching and upgrades. By pairing open-source software with purpose-built Storinator hardware, 45Drives enables organizations to build resilient infrastructure designed to fail gracefully rather than catastrophically. For more information about 45Drives, visit https://www.45drives.com.
Mitch Hall, Chief Architect of 45Drives, will deliver a technical session focused on next-generation Ceph performance, drawing on benchmarking and operational testing. The presentation will examine advances in erasure coding performance in newer Ceph releases, comparing it against traditional storage models using identical hardware and network configurations. Evaluation will include synthetic IOPS, latency, throughput testing, and real-world block workloads running in 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 transparency is essential for operators making infrastructure decisions at scale, particularly as more teams evaluate open-source infrastructure to escape escalating licensing costs and regain control over their environments."
Ceph Days Raleigh will feature presentations on Ceph project updates, performance optimization, emerging hardware technologies like NVMe storage devices, and guidance on running Ceph across multi-site environments. Sessions will also examine integrations with Kubernetes, OpenShift, and OpenStack, alongside operational best practices for deployments ranging from enterprise to edge installations, supported by production case studies. Key event milestones include registration opening and call for papers on February 16, 2026, speaker notifications on February 27, 2026, and schedule publication on March 6, 2026.
