Every company starts with a core motivation. In our recent feature on the Insider Research Podcast, CLYSO founder and CEO Joachim Kraftmayer sat down with news analyst Oliver Schonschek to talk about how CLYSO came to be. They discussed why storage is the ultimate foundation for modern data, research, and digital services, and why we believe Ceph is the right platform for organizations looking to reclaim control over their infrastructure.
Prefer watching over reading? Catch the full interview and deep dive on YouTube:
>> Watch the podcast here
What We Talked About in the Podcast
Instead of just sharing a technical overview, Joachim shared the story behind our engineering philosophy and how we approach enterprise storage:
How CLYSO Started: We launched back in 2010 as one of Germany’s first infrastructure and cloud computing (IaaS/PaaS) companies. We deliberately chose to focus on storage because we love solving the complex, engineering-heavy challenges that come with distributed systems and stateful services.
The Reality of Digital Sovereignty: True independence is often an afterthought when companies build out their tech stacks, but ignoring it early on leads to massive vendor lock-in costs later. Our goal is to help businesses design their infrastructure from a position of strength and long-term control.
Why Ceph is the Best Choice Today: Proprietary storage solutions usually trap you in forced migration cycles every five years. Ceph breaks down these traditional hardware silos by providing a unified, highly resilient architecture that scales seamlessly both up and down based on actual needs.
Moving Open Source to the Enterprise: With more than 14 years of hands-on experience, we built our CLYSO Enterprise Storage (CES) solution directly alongside our customers' real-world needs. Beyond just saving data, we focus on simplifying complex storage management and optimizing workloads for demanding environments like AI, Machine Learning, and High-Performance Computing (HPC).
Our Role in the Open Source Ecosystem: We also discussed our work within the Deutschland Stack and the Apeiro Reference Architecture (IPCEI-CIS), where CLYSO takes responsibility for the open-source storage components.
Where to Find Us
We are deeply rooted in the open-source community. Aside from having four official Ceph Ambassadors on our team, we actively organize lots of CephDays worldwide.
If you want to catch up with us in person, we are regularly on the ground at events like KubeCon, Cloud Native Days, the SCS Summit, and OpenInfra meetups. You can also drop by our main office in Munich or connect with our global team members who are stationed across the world to support our clients around the clock.