Red Hat Adds Tiering and Data Protection Features

Red Hat, Inc. announced the availability of its Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 with new features to help customers store and manage an entire spectrum of data – from hot mission-critical data to cold archival data.

The new functionality, coupled with enhancements to the solution’s Calamari management and monitoring platform, make Inktank Ceph Enterprise storage solution a flexible and cost-effective storage platform for enterprises managing data-intensive applications.

In May, 2014, Red Hat acquired Inktank, provider of Ceph and Inktank Ceph Enterprise open source storage solutions. It delivers object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack. Combined with Red Hat’s existing GlusterFS-based file storage offering, the addition of Inktank positions Red Hat as one of the providers of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage. As part of this announcement, Inktank Ceph Enterprise supports the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 to provide an integrated OpenStack stack that is delivered from and supported by a single vendor.

According to IDC’s report Worldwide Cold Storage Ecosystem Taxonomy, published in March 20141, as data continues to grow at an exponential pace, enterprises increasingly recognize the importance of categorizing and storing data based on frequency of access and relevance, or rather, temperature-with newer or hot data sets stored with highest priority and performance.

The addition of tiering capabilities to Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 enables enterprises to more effectively execute management of all data – from mission-critical to archival – providing an opportunity to reduce storage costs.

Inktank Ceph Enterprise now enables users to define pools for storing data densely, and therefore more cost-effectively, as well as caching pools that can deliver high-performance. The new erasure encoded storage pools provide enterprise-scale durability that can lower raw capacity requirements by up to 50% (relative to industry standard 3x replication; actual savings will vary depending on erasure coding parameters selected.) Additionally, new cache tiering pools enable both hot-to-cold and cold-to-hot data management. By combining the power of these new features, customers can create the right blend of price and performance tailored to their specific needs.

Continuing Red Hat’s commitment to customer choice, Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 is supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 and 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04.

Key new features and benefits in Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 include:

• Erasure Coding, making it suitable for archive and cold storage use cases by reducing the cost per gig.
• Cache Tiering, enabling hot data to be moved onto high-performance media when it becomes active and cold data to be moved onto low-performance media when it is no longer active.
• Calamari v1.2, updating the Ceph management platform to support management functions. These updates will enable an administrator to manage the core functionality of the reliable autonomic distributed object store (RADOS) storage cluster, including the ability to manage individual storage devices and pool policies. Calamari is an application with management tools and performance data that simplifies operational management and enables administrators to adapt to changes in their Ceph clusters. In May 2014, Red Hat announced that Calamari had been open sourced as part of the upstream Ceph community.

Integration with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4 and 5, enables an integrated OpenStack cloud storage and platform solution that is supported by one vendor.

Neil Levine, director, product management, storage and big data, Red Hat, said: “Enterprises are under pressure to store expanding amounts of data with limited IT budgets. As part of our commitment to redefining the economics of software-defined storage, the new archiving and tiering functionality in Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 enables users to define pools for storing data densely, and therefore more cost-effectively, as well as pools that serve data very quickly. And, because these pools all work together, customers can now create the blend of price and performance that’s right for them for both cold and hot storage.”

Steven Stover, director of engineered solutions, Dell, Inc., said: “Dell and Red Hat have partnered for more than 15 years to bring global customers value with Red Hat open source software solutions across Dell’s enterprise offerings. Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise, which delivers a highly scalable, reliable cloud storage solution that can cost-effectively support different types and volumes of enterprise data, can further enterprise customers’ acceleration of OpenStack-based clouds. We look forward to delivering Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 to our customers in our Dell Red Hat Private Cloud Solutions.”