Inktank Reveals Ceph Cuttlefish

Inktank Storage, Inc., the company delivering Ceph – the massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system, announced the latest release, dubbed Cuttlefish.

Cuttlefish release focuses on Red Hat support, improved enterprise adoption through quicker installation, greater operational ease for administrators scaling their Ceph deployments, along with new features.

Ceph is a self-managing, scalable, open source distributed storage system that delivers object, block, and file storage in a single system that runs on commodity hardware.

Significant for enterprise customers, Ceph packages are now available for Red Hat 6.3, with Inktank committed to offering commercial support for Ceph on this and future versions of the OS.

Cuttlefish adds a deployment tool, ceph-deploy, to enable new users to start running a multi-node Ceph cluster in minutes, for users looking to achieve quick proof of concepts for the storage system. Thanks to a new range of configuration management recipes compatible with tools like Chef, Puppet and Juju, getting started with Ceph is easier.

Cuttlefish also takes steps to make certain that administrators are able to scale their Ceph cluster for maximum capacity and operational ease. This is done by ensuring all the common administrative functions necessary for running an object storage service are available via a RESTful API; administrators can now create, delete or modify users and their access, as well as manipulate and audit users’ bucket and object data using the API. This makes it simple to hook Ceph into provisioning or billing systems.

Other features also available include incremental snapshots of block devices for backups, at-rest encryption of data for secure disk disposal and quotas for storage pools to help with capacity planning.

"The Cuttlefish release is a testament to the cohesive involvement between the Ceph development team, Inktank’s support staff, and the community of contributors at large," said Bryan Bogensberger, president and CEO of Inktank. "We’ve been excited to see a sharp increase in the number of commits from the community to make this release happen, both in terms of feature creation and bug squashing. Our goal with the Cuttlefish cycle is to make Ceph, already the only unified, open source storage system that enables block, object, and file storage, more accessible and easier to implement by more people."