[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Mark Shuttleworth has invested $1 million through a convertible note in Inktank, a company that provides enterprise-level support for the open source Ceph distributed storage system.

The Ceph open source distributed storage system combines object storage, block storage, and a POSIX-compatible file system in an unified platform that runs on commodity hardware. Ceph was integrated into the mainline Linux kernel in 2010.

Inktank is a professional services and support company that was founded in 2012 by several creators of Ceph, including Sage Weil, cofounder of DreamHost and CEO and chief architect of Ceph. The company is based in Los Angeles, CA and is funded by New Dream Network.

Since launching in May 2012, Inktank has expanded to a second office in Sunnyvale and continues to scour for new recruits, says the company.

Mark Shuttleworth is a South African entrepreneur, who became the first South African in space. He is the founder of Canonical and provides leadership for the Ubuntu operating system.