45Drives builds on open source, all the way down.
Ceph. ZFS. A web dashboard called Houston UI, built on the open-source Cockpit project. No proprietary lock-in, no black-box firmware you can't inspect — just well-known, widely-used open technology, assembled and supported by a hardware and services company. This site is an independent look at that stack: what it is, why it matters, and how to try it yourself.
Why “open source” is the actual value-add
Most enterprise storage vendors sell you a box and a proprietary control plane you can’t see inside. If the vendor changes strategy, raises prices, or discontinues a product line, you’re stuck. 45Drives’ pitch is structurally different: the software doing the real work — the filesystem, the clustering, the management UI — is open source. You can read the code, audit it, run it on other hardware if you ever needed to, and lean on an entire upstream community (not just one vendor) for long-term viability.
What you’re actually paying 45Drives for isn’t the software — it’s the hardware engineering, the integration work that makes all these open pieces function as one coherent system, and a support relationship with people who know the stack cold. That’s a genuinely different value proposition than most of the storage industry, and it’s worth understanding on its own terms.
Ceph
The distributed storage engine behind 45Drives' scale-out clusters — self-healing, no single point of failure, and entirely open source.
ZFS
The filesystem behind 45Drives' single-server storage — checksummed, snapshot-capable, and built to catch data corruption before you ever notice it.
Houston UI
The easiest way to see this stack in action. A web dashboard built on Red Hat's open-source Cockpit project, extended by 45Drives' own open-source plugins.
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