Samsung NVMe SSD Reference Design Combined With Red Hat Ceph Storage Software

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. announced that its NVMe (SSD) Reference Design will be used with Red Hat Ceph Storage, a software-defined storage platform, in a performant Ceph Reference Architecture by Samsung.

Samsung’s NVMe Reference Design platform, together with Red Hat Ceph Storage, can deliver a scalable, more efficient TCO reference architecture that supports unified storage for enterprise IT or cloud environments in handling transactional databases, machine-generated data and unstructured data.

The combined storage solution – referred to as the Red Hat Ceph/Samsung Reference Architecture – can be used as it is or customized for a specific data center environment with an easier migration path, and can offer positive TCO impact. It can be deployed in an OpenStack environment to support the bandwidth, latency and IO/s requirements of performant workloads and use cases, such as distributed MySQL databases, telco nDVR content retrieval and financial services.

“The data center community will appreciate the importance of the Red Hat Ceph/Samsung Storage Reference Architecture, as the harvesting of data analytics becomes a priority for businesses that want to better understand their customers and stay ahead of their competition,” said Jim Elliott, corporate VP, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. “Data-driven companies in search of performance optimization in an OpenStack environment can benefit from the high performance offered by Red Hat Ceph Storage software and our NVMe Reference Design as a compliment to existing capacity-optimized infrastructure.“

“We see Samsung as a key partner in our efforts to optimize software-defined storage solutions in the data center,” said Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, storage division, Red Hat. “Our collaborative Ceph Reference Architecture, based on the Samsung NVMe Reference Design, can help customers improve bandwidth, and enable high scalability and low latency. Combined with high IO/s performance, it offers an optimal OpenStack storage solution for many use cases.“

The Samsung NVMe Reference system is engineered to provide a well-balanced storage server node that includes matching CPUs, networking, and storage-PCIe connectivity to deploy large amounts of NVMe SSDs and maximize the performance of Ceph.

Based on Samsung testing, the Red Hat Ceph/Samsung Reference Architecture can deliver 690,000 IO/s and 30GB/s in a three-node cluster to meet the requirements of IO-intensive and performant workloads. Performance can scale higher with additional nodes. As a result, it offers an optimized pool of high-speed storage designed for OpenStack deployments, virtual infrastructures, and financial service providers, as well as private and public clouds.

In addition, the reference architecture can help increase storage efficiency in test or development environments that need to be deployed and dismantled quickly.

Designed to improve the provisioning of data center storage in high IO/s Ceph storage clusters, the Samsung NVMe Reference system is an all-flash NVMe scale-out storage server with up to 24 x 2.5″ hot-pluggable, NVMe SSDs to provide capacity in a small footprint. It is based on PCIe Gen3 NVMe SSDs designed to offer low latency with an optimized data path from the CPU to the SSDs. Each SSD slot provides power and cooling for up to 25W to support current and future generation, large capacity SSDs, as well as SSDs with varying endurance and performance levels.

The Samsung NVMe Reference system is a dual-socket Xeon-based system with an EIA-compliant, 2RU chassis. It uses 4x 40Gb/s networking connectivity with RDMA.