Inktank, the only company to provide enterprise-level support for the Ceph Distributed Storage System, has gotten a million-dollar investment from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth. It's a personal investment made through a convertible note.

Ceph is the open source distributed storage system that delivers object storage, block storage and a POSIX-compatible file system in one unified system.

Inktank claims Ceph, which runs on commodity hardware, is the "future of storage," freeing users from restrictive and proprietary storage solutions.

The widgetry was integrated into the Linux kernel in 2010 and the new version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS released in May.

The Ceph project has been active in the OpenStack community alongside Canonical.

In a statement Shuttleworth said, "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. The distinctive architecture of Ceph gives it natural advantages over both proprietary and open source competitors. We found Ceph to be mature enough to warrant its inclusion in Ubuntu 12.10 as a storage option for our OpenStack reference architecture, widely deployed in both telco and corporate environments."

Inktank president Bryan Bogensberger said, "The demand for Ceph has been extraordinary, and we will use the additional funding to continue Inktank's accelerated growth to meet the globally expanding needs of those adopting Ceph and operating Ceph storage clusters."