CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE croit company presentation IT Press Tour #51 2023-06-27/28, Berlin

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE croit Background and Genesis

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Shareholders of croit The inspiration comes from Martin's previous company, where he had already gained experience with Ceph since 2011. croit brings together real customer needs and pains learned from previous storage experiences: The need for cost-efficient, flexible, and scalable storage and the pain of deploying and operating it. Founded in January 2017, the partners worked together to build the globally distributed team and company. Martin Verges Matthias Grandl Andy Muthmann

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE croit - Smart Technologies made Easy ● Founded >6 years ago in 2017 ● Employees: 23 ○ in 10 countries ○ on 5 continents ● Constant high growth ● Deloitte Technology Fast50 Award in 2022 (854% growth 2018-2021) ● Intel DAOS Partner ○ Software Development ○ 3rd party support ● Founding member of the Ceph Foundation ● Member of the Linux Foundation

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE A few of our Deployments... (Only deployments sending telemetry data)

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Ceph and DAOS

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE What is Ceph Storage? ● Software-defined, Unified, Scale-out Storage ● Open Source ● Highly flexible Solution ● Self-healing ● Reliable ● Matured over 10 years ● Extensive ecosystem ○ https://github.com/ceph/ceph ○ > 10.000 Stars ○ > 130.000 Commits Supported protocols: ● RBD (Rados Block Device) ● CephFS (Posix File System) ● RadosGW (S3 Object Store) ● iSCSI ● NFS (Network File System) ● SMB (Samba/CIFS) ● NVMe-oF (work in progress)

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE What is DAOS Storage (1/2)? ● Supercomputer technology developed by Intel ● Optimized for Low Latency I/O and High Bandwidth ● Open Source ● High Available ● Scale-out Storage ● Much more! Supported protocols: ● DAOS Supported with croit: ● NVMe-oF ● NFS (Network File System) ● S3 Object Store ● SMB (Samba/CIFS)

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE What is DAOS Storage (2/2)? Basic Concept ● Distributed parallel file system ● High performance KV store ● Scale-out storage solution ● Next generation ○ Persistent Memory, CXL ○ NVMe ● Storage SDK Inside a DAOS storage, you can write your own data structures and models to greatly improve performance of your application ● End-to-end data integrity ● Provides data redundancy ● Advanced data protection with self-healing ● Provides multiple networking options ○ TCP Sockets (Ethernet) ○ RDMA (Infiniband, Omnipath) ● Transactional non-blocking I/O ● Linearly scales the performance

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Vision and Mission

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Our vision and mission Vision We believe that all smart technologies, regardless of their complexity, should be easily usable by all companies to create better products and services for the benefit of all people. Mission Our mission is to identify and adapt intelligent open source technologies to enable companies and their employees to deploy them quickly, reliably and cost-effectively. We love learning and playing with technologies and bringing them to a wider audience in the form of beautiful and user-friendly solutions.

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Pains and Needs

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Pains and Needs in Data Storage Needs ● Scalability ● Performance ● Flexibility ● Availability ● Support Pains ● Growth ● Costs (capex/opex) ● Staffing/learning (solution/technology) ● Data loss ● Maintenance, Updates, Upgrades

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Our solution solves many storage pains and needs ● Easy to deploy on large storage clusters in under one hour instead of weeks ● Distributes data across available media ● Creates copies for redundancy ● Checks data integrity ● Self-heals data after hardware failures while affected data is still available ● Provides access as file, block and object storage via all protocols ● Scales by adding more servers ● Automatically updates and upgrades the installation

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Our Value Proposition is the Unique Combination of: ● The flexibility of Ceph is unmatched ● DAOS Storage is the world's fastest storage technology as seen in the official io500 benchmarks. Latest results of the Argonne Deployment shows >6TB/s Bandwidth! ● Our 24*7 Support, managed service, and professional service offering keeps away any possible trouble you might encounter without using croit. ● As we are vendor agnostic, customers can save a lot of money by using the most cost efficient commodity hardware. ● When planned and deployed with croit, the system can provide an extremely high availability.

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Is that innovative? We believe it is… … and we received an award for our work https://www.top100.de/die-top-innovatoren/

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Product Demonstration

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Use Cases

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Ceph Use Cases ● Backup, Archive ● Storage backend for Proxmox, OpenStack, Kubernetes, VmWare, Seafile… ● Large File Systems ● S3 for various use cases, e.g. ○ Data Lakes ○ Media Storage ○ Backup Target ● Scientific Use Cases ● or a combination of the above ● and many more…

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE A few croit use cases/case studies ● Washington University in St. Louis: ○ Faster and cheaper storage solution for the Neuroinformatics Research Group ○ Whitepaper: https://www.intel.co.uk/content/dam/www/central-libraries/us/en/documents/intel-croit -white-paper-9de.pdf ● IAV GmbH Ingenieurgesellschaft Auto und Verkehr (Engineering company car and traffic) ○ croit Ceph cluster for various workloads ● Eurac, Bozen University (Italy) ○ croit Ceph cluster for various research data

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Competition and Differentiators

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Competition and croit Differentiators (1/4) ● Cloud Service Provider ○ AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM, … ● croit differentiator ○ Cost ○ Not being the cloud ■ Many of our customer made a decision against using cloud offerings (and not always for cost reasons), but expect similar benefits

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Competition and croit Differentiators (2/4) ● “Appliance-based” Storage Provider ○ NetApp, Dell EMC, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi Vantara, Pure Storage,... ● croit differentiator ○ Cost ○ Scalability (capacity and performance) ○ No end of life (as we constantly update the solution) ○ No overpriced support extension for end of life products

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Competition and croit Differentiators (3/4) ● Software-defined Storage Provider (not only Ceph specific) ○ IBM Spectrum Scale, VAST, WEKA, Qumulo, CLOUDIAN, SCALITY, ddn, PAVILION, … ○ Some of these are actually better in some aspects than our Ceph based storage solution ■ Analytics features for data usage ■ Ransomware protection ■ Data workflow management ○ But also many of them are limited in scope (object, file, block) or the supported hardware (e.g. spinning rust vs. flash) ● croit differentiator ○ Cost ○ Features (supported storage classes) ○ HDD and flash support ○ Alone the option to use features or other disc types later is sometimes a differentiator

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Competition and croit Differentiators (4/4) ● Ceph Storage Provider ○ IBM, RedHat, SoftIron, Ambedded, Petasan, … ● croit differentiator ○ Cost ○ Features (we believe to be the most complete Ceph solution) ○ Support

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Great Support ● Product Development and Support work hand in hand

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Go to market

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Go to market ● Mostly direct ● Started reselling business 1,5 years ago ● A few resellers onboarded ● Focus regions: Europe and Americas, Asia planned for earliest next year

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Partners

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Pricing Model ● Node based licensing ○ Different sizes and terms available ● License always includes 24/7 support

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Roadmap and Future

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Upcoming products and services Products: ● New core platform ● croit for DAOS storage (Ultra-High performance) ○ Super computer technology ○ Optimized for high performance computing (HPC) ○ Made available for wide range of enterprise applications Services: ● Storage as a Service ● Managed storage

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Long term roadmap The extension of the croit Platform with new modules like: ● croit for Data Movement ○ Managing data across systems ● croit for Compute Workloads ○ Flexible workload management Additional: ● croit Hardware appliances More than just a storage company

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Expansion plans ● Ramping up the US market ○ croit North America Inc. established in 2022 ○ 3 employees and growing ● Market entry Asia planned for 2024/25

CROIT RETHINKING STORAGE Thank you for your attention! www.croit.io [email protected]