Ceph has been a powerhouse in the open source storage world for years – a flexible, massively scalable, and reliable provider of block, file, and object storage for cloud services. While Ceph has been available on Arm64 for many years, and many people are happily using community distributions of Ceph to drive large Arm64 storage clusters, commercial support has been the missing piece for many enterprise users. That is now changing.

At Ceph Days London 2025 this week, Federico Lucifredi, Product Management Director for the Ceph Platform at IBM and Red Hat, announced commercial support for the Ceph client tooling starting this month, in June 2025. This includes the essential tooling needed to connect applications to Ceph clusters, including userspace and kernel tools for RBD, CephFS, and their dependencies (e.g. librados). In addition, Federico shared that full commercial support for Ceph storage clusters running on Arm64 is planned across multiple IBM and Red Hat product lines by the end of 2025, signaling a deep and long-term commitment to the architecture.

For customers of products like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift, this means full support when using Ceph block and file storage for applications running on Arm64 instances on cloud services — object workloads are inherently supported from any S3 client. Customers of public clouds are increasingly adopting these instances, both to reduce their cloud costs and to meet sustainability goals.

With the client-side now supported on Arm64, customers can begin integrating Arm64-based servers into their infrastructure today - for example, running Kubernetes workloads on Arm64 OpenShift, while connecting to x86 Ceph storage clusters over the network. And with support for Arm64 Ceph clusters on the horizon, full Arm64-native storage stacks are clearly on the roadmap.

Federico was joined on stage by our own Peter Pouliot, Senior Developer Advocate at Ampere® Computing, who shared the long collaboration that Ampere and the Ceph community have jointly pursued to reach this point. This milestone is the result of continued technical collaboration between Ampere and the Ceph community over the years. Ampere has been the primary supplier of Arm64 hardware to the Ceph Community Lab, enabling software builds and test validation to take place natively on Arm64 — on Ampere® Altra® platforms. Ampere platforms are undergoing integration into the Ceph Community’s CI lab with the aim of reaching testing parity with x86 in the upstream project. The collaboration reflects the best of open source: transparent, iterative work, benefitting the whole ecosystem.

For hybrid cloud customers, this announcement is a clear indication of Arm64 continued rise in the datacenter, from compute to storage. Major cloud providers already offer Arm64 instances, and in the datacenter, energy efficiency and performance-per-watt and iops-per-watt are driving adoption of platforms like Ampere. With Ceph joining the ranks of other commercially supported workloads, the Arm64 software ecosystem takes another step forward - and customers gain more freedom to design efficient, cost-effective infrastructure.

We are excited to see more about IBM’s commercial support of Ceph on Arm64 and Ampere Platforms in the future and look forward to customers taking advantage of Ceph on Arm64 for performant, high core count, power efficient Ampere Computing cores within IBM Ceph products and solutions. Lucifredi shared that “Ceph’s role as the open source storage platform of choice has been lacking adequate support for Arm. Community interest has long been bubbling with anticipation. At IBM, we are equally excited about the commercial opportunity we see for Ceph in ARM-powered hybrid cloud storage.”

To get started with Ceph on Ampere, check out our case study and white paper. You can also read more about the performance of Ceph on Ampere platforms. As we move toward full server support, we invite the community to join the effort by testing on Arm64, volunteering in the Ceph Community Lab, sharing feedback, and helping shape the future of cloud-native storage.