Red Hat Updates Storage Portfolio With Ceph Storage 1.3 and Gluster Storage 3.1 Software-Defined Storage Solutions

Red Hat, Inc. announced Ceph Storage 1.3 and Gluster Storage 3.1 open software-defined storage solutions.

The features and capabilities for company’s storage give enterprise IT administrators robust data protection, performance and management at petabyte scale.

Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage are open source, scale-out software-defined storage solutions that run on commodity hardware and have durable, programmable architectures. Validated to work with partner hardware and software solutions, each Red Hat Storage product is well-suited for different enterprise workloads, bringing compelling benefits to enterprises.

Ceph Storage 1.3
Built from the ground up as a next-generation storage system, Ceph Storage is suitable for powering infrastructure platforms. It has a highly tunable, extensible and configurable architecture that offers mature interfaces for enterprise block and object storage and renders it well-suited for archival and rich media and cloud infrastructure workloads, such as OpenStack. Available, Ceph Storage 1.3 includes several features and enhancements, such as:

• Robustness at scale, from improved rebalancing logic that prioritizes data integrity over other automatic functions, and a new rebalancing ‘pause’ feature that reduces impact on performance during cluster changes. Ceph Storage 1.3 features time-scheduled scrubbing that prevents automatic administrative checks from occurring during peak hours and affecting performance, and sharding of S3 bucket metadata that enables bucket operation load balancing across a cluster.

• Enhanced performance, resulting from IO/s and latency optimizations for Ceph running on flash storage devices, contributed by Intel and SanDisk; acceleration of VM boot times using read ahead caching; and sustained block performance by limiting file system fragmentation.

• Operational efficiency improvements, including the lightweight, embedded Civetweb server to ease deployment of the Ceph Object Gateway, and faster execution of administrative actions on block devices, such as resizing, deleting or exporting, even with extremely large images. Ceph Storage 1.3 includes management support for multiple users and clusters via the Ceph UI and API, and API-based policy management that enables programmatic adjustment of failure domains and data placement.

Gluster Storage 3.1
Gluster Storage is purpose-built as a scale-out file store with a straightforward architecture suitable for public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Offering mature network file system (NFS), Server Message Block (SMB), and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) file interfaces, Gluster Storage is well-suited for enterprise virtualization, analytics, sync and share, and rich media workloads. Scheduled to become available later this summer, Gluster Storage 3.1 includes features and enhancements, designed to increase performance and security at scale, such as:

• Support for erasure-coded dispersed storage volumes that reconstruct corrupted or lost data by using information about the data stored elsewhere in the system can reduce the need for RAID and replication and TCO by up to 75%.

• Tiering’s automated movement of data between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ tiers in a volume-based on-access frequency gives operators fine-grain control to deploy storage clusters that are both cost-effective and highly performant for a variety of workloads.

• Bit-rot detection scans data periodically to detect data corruption resulting from silent failures in underlying storage media, enhancing end-to-end data integrity.

• Enhanced security via support for SELinux in enforcing mode and SSL-based network encryption to increase security across the deployment; support for active NFSv4, based on the NFS-Ganesha project, to provide performant and secure data access through clustered NFSv4 endpoints; and SMB 3 capabilities, adding protocol negotiation, copy-data offload and in-flight data encryption to allow for efficient file transfer and secure access in Windows environments.

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, storage and big data, Red Hat, said: “Open, software-defined storage is the one of the best ways for enterprises to design and deploy storage at petabyte scale. We continue to listen to our customers and today we respond with new Red Hat Storage products that help manage their exponentially growing capacity requirements, securely across the enterprise. With the new features in Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat delivers uncompromised performance at scale to our enterprise customers worldwide.”