Red Hat Ceph Storage 2

Red Hat, Inc. announced Ceph Storage 2, the next generation of its open software-defined storage platform.

Ceph Storage 2, based on the Ceph Jewel release, introduces several new capabilities that enhance support for object storage workloads and promote greater ease of use.

Ceph was designed to enable and support enterprises’ digital transformation efforts through web scale object and cloud infrastructures. As an object storage solution, it is for enterprises with deployments approaching a petabyte of data or more. Ceph Storage 2 brings enhanced capabilities for enterprise object storage customers who are demanding scale, increased security, and compatibility with industry-standard APIs.

Object storage features in Ceph Storage 2 include:

• New global object storage clusters, which provide a single namespace and data synchronization between clusters operating in multiple regions.

• Improved security via integration with authentication systems, including Active Directory, LDAP, and OpenStack Identity (Keystone) v3.

• Enhanced Amazon S3 and OpenStack Object Storage Swift compatibility, including support for AWS v4 Client Signatures, object versioning, bulk deletes, and more.

Ceph Storage 2 also debuts company’s Storage Console 2, a storage management and monitoring system with a redesigned, streamlined user interface. This technology simplifies both the deployment and operational management of Ceph, making scale-out storage accessible to a wider range of users while reducing deployment time from days to hours in tests conducted by the company. Building on Ansible as a foundation, Storage Console 2 delivers a single, clean, and modern graphical interface to proactively monitor and manage health, performance and capacity utilization.

The firm also announced a tech preview of CephFS, the POSIX-compliant file system that uses a Ceph storage cluster to store its data and can be used with the OpenStack Manila service. This is a continuation of the firm’s ongoing commitment to complete and tightly integrated storage for OpenStack environments.

Ceph Storage 2 is scheduled for availability this summer.

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, storage, Red Hat, said: “We are thrilled to release Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 and expand our capabilities around ease of use and robust object storage support. This latest version of the product is the most significant update to Red Hat Ceph Storage since we acquired Inktank in 2014. We believe our customers will find Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 to be a full-featured, technically-advanced storage platform that’s easy to use and helps them manage vast quantities of data at the enterprise. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, combined with Red Hat’s broad services and support offerings, gives customers a strong foundation to enable their digital transformation.“

Greg Lissy, VP, enterprise product management, Citrix Systems, Inc., said: “Citrix is committed to supporting our customers by enabling them to more securely access their data regardless of the storage infrastructure they choose. By collaborating with Red Hat and certifying Red Hat Ceph Storage for use with Citrix ShareFile, we continue to develop solutions that help our customers embrace digital business transformation, all while remaining competitive.“

James Mouton, VP and GM, extreme scale infrastructure, Dell, Inc., said: “Dell continues to partner with Red Hat in developing next-generation, cost-effective storage solutions in our Extreme Scale Infrastructure and OpenStack cloud solutions with Red Hat Ceph Storage 2. Our DSS 7000 server, with its massive 720TB capacity in a single 4U chassis and 1 or 2 addressable servers, offers ideal flexibility for multi-petabyte scale-out and archival storage making use of Ceph’s enhanced object storage feature set. We look forward to showcasing the ground-breaking capabilities this innovative solution can deliver for our customers at Red Hat Summit 2016.“

Blair Bethwaite, senior consultant, HPC, Monash eResearch Centre, said: “Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 is a powerful, scalable and unified software-defined storage platform that has enabled us to liberate data services to the many and varied needs of researchers. With Red Hat Ceph Storage, the problem of taming and retaining vast amounts of research data is no longer a grand challenge, and as a testament to that scalability we have built the largest Ceph deployment in the southern hemisphere. Using Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 we are able to manage massive workloads encompassing 5 petabytes of data in a single infrastructure. We would not have been able to achieve this without the block and object storage capabilities of Red Hat’s solution, we look forward to adding several petabytes of new storage in Q3 and trialling CephFS with this feature-packed new release.“

Piyanai Saowarattitada, director, engineering, Massachusetts Open Cloud, said:  “We needed a storage solution that would be cost-effective, reliable and scalable to accommodate the large amounts of data our researchers work with every day. We found it with Red Hat Ceph Storage 2. The Ceph command set is intuitive and easy to use. We greatly appreciate the comprehensive Red Hat Ceph training and field deployment support. Their deep knowledge and understanding of our needs helped pave the way for a successful deployment.“

Matt Yonkovit, VP, services, Percona LLC, said: “As more and more distributed databases reside in public and private clouds they need to be able to communicate and synchronize quickly and seamlessly. MySQL on OpenStack – backed by Red Hat Ceph Storage – opens up a well-performing and affordable option for databases in private cloud deployments. As a trusted advisor for optimizing open source database environments, Percona is always looking for approaches and architectures that intelligently solve customer issues in a cost-effective manner. Consolidating large numbers of distributed databases on a single elastic storage cloud infrastructure fits those criteria.“

Jim Elliott, corporate VP, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc., said: “Combining two of the most disruptive approaches to storage today, our ongoing collaborations with Red Hat including work with Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 can be viewed as a win-win for OpenStack datacenter managers by delivering scalable all-flash storage solutions that provide extremely high IO/s, low latency and exceptional reliability. We see the software-defined ecosystem as an integral part of the enterprise storage business and plan to continue to work very closely with Red Hat to develop the best possible storage systems for next-generation OpenStack enterprise workloads.“

Gary Lyng, senior director, DCS marketing, Western Digital Corp., said: “Red Hat continues to move the ball forward with its Ceph investments and we are excited about the latest launch. Sandisk has performed an expansive amount of performance characterization testing with Red Hat targeted for Red Hat Ceph Storage deployments that need higher IO/s. The latest testing of InfiniFlash System IF150 by Sandisk with Red Hat Ceph Storage has shown it can provide more than one million random read IO/s – opening up a whole new set of potential workloads for private cloud and scale out storage.“

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