Inktank's offering, he says, has a cost-per-gigabyte advantage over less open competitors.

"A service provider can legitimately, tomorrow, launch an object store that can compete with even the lowest tier of the Amazon pricing at 5 cents or 6 cents per gig," says Bogensberger.

Ceph's open-source nature and ability to run on commodity hardware allow it to deliver substantial cost savings, he says. The framework uses the LGPL Version 2 to help protect against potential copyright issues, which Bogensberger says were crucial concerns when developing Ceph.

"We actually just went through a license audit to make sure we've done everything correctly," he says.

While this "doesn't mean we can't" develop proprietary features around Ceph in the future, Bogensberger adds, the group's goal is to maintain the framework's openness.