Red Hat Ceph Storage 3

Red Hat, Inc. announced Ceph Storage 3, a major upgrade to its scalable, software-defined object storage platform, with the introduction of support for block storage via iSCSI and file storage via CephFS.

With these additions, Ceph Storage 3 extends the value of unified storage in OpenStack and heterogeneous environments, substantially broadening the use cases for the storage platform built for petabyte-scale deployments.

Ceph Storage 3 builds on the company’s years in object storage, enables more robust and better performance at scale, and introduces the ability to deploy storage in containers for cost-savings and operational efficiencies.

Ceph Storage 3 includes following highlights:

• Enables a variety of storage needs in OpenStack, helping enterprises exploit the scale of the platform for cloud infrastructure deployments without incurring costs of discrete storage systems that need to be procured and managed separately. The introduction of CephFS, a POSIX-compatible, scale-out file system complements the existing block and object storage support provided by Ceph Storage for OpenStack. Customers will be able to incorporate storage more effectively with OpenStack for private cloud deployments across a number of use cases including web-scale cloud, Network Functions Virtualization infrastructure (NFVi), and development/compute clouds.

• Eases migration from legacy storage platforms through newly-added support for the iSCSI interface for wider platform support and increased breadth of use cases, including backup and recovery. This is particularly beneficial to heterogeneous storage environments such as VMware and Windows that lack a native Ceph driver. The iSCSI gateway enables enterprises to use a single, cost-effective, and highly scalable, block storage platform for existing virtualization infrastructure alongside their use of Ceph with modern workloads, reducing the need for dedicated SANs.

• Deploys enterprise storage in Linux containers for simplified operations and a smaller hardware footprint. Containerized storage daemons enable users to run Ceph Storage on fewer servers by co-locating services that previously required dedicated hardware while avoiding the risk of resource conflicts. Preliminary tests based on a standard Ceph Storage cluster configuration showed lowered hardware expenditure by at least 24%. This is particularly relevant to telco customers, such as those implementing NFVi, who struggle with hardware and space constraints.

Ceph Storage 3 also aims to improve the user experience by helping administrators proactively monitor and troubleshoot distributed storage clusters via a graphical view of usage data for the cluster as a whole, or its individual components. The web-based interface, which includes more than a dozen dashboards, is based on the upstream Ceph Metrics project. This release also adds several other usability enhancements and layers of automation, such as dynamic bucket sharding, designed to help simplify maintenance and lower operational costs.

This release builds on the company’s momentum in the storage market. Recently, the firm’s storage was positioned in the ‘Visionaries’ quadrant of Gartner, Inc.’s October 2017 Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage for the second year in a row. The company is positioned the furthest right for completeness of vision and the highest in ability to execute within the Visionaries quadrant.

Ceph Storage 3 is based on the community version of the open source Ceph Luminous project, to which the firm is a leading code contributor.

Ceph Storage 3 is expected to be available in November 2017.

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, storage, Red Hat, said:”Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 represents a key milestone for OpenStack, VMware, and Windows communities in need of a unified storage solution. With this release, Red Hat lays the groundwork for all software-based storage services to be delivered as containers in the future while helping customers increase agility and shrink deployment costs.“

Olivier Delachapelle, head, data center category management EMEIA, Fujitsu Ltd., said: “Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 is probably the most advanced software-defined storage solution combining extreme scalability, inherent disaster resilience, and significant price-capacity value. By combining Red Hat Ceph Storage with Fujitsu server technology and networking components to a complete solution stack including end-to-end maintenance services, we are helping customers fully benefit from open source SDS without the implementation and life-cycle risks of a ‘build-your-own-storage’ approach.“

Laura DuBois, group VP, IDC, said: “Spending on software-defined storage solutions continues to outpace spending on traditional storage architectures. Software-defined storage offers the capabilities needed in digital transformation namely IT agility with greater levels of automation and lower capital costs. Red Hat Ceph Storage provides a highly scalable, unified and software-defined platform supporting performance at scale for current workloads while providing the ability to deploy storage in containers and easily manage storage in OpenStack cloud infrastructure deployments.“

Eric Endebrock, VP, marketing, storage business unit, Micron Technology, Inc., said: “As cloud computing evolves to all-flash infrastructures, Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 supports that trend in many ways, such as enabling native writes to the block storage device to provide a strong performance boost. Micron Accelerated Ceph Storage clusters were built on Red Hat Ceph Storage with Red Hat’s collaboration. Based on scalable all-NVMe reference architectures, they are a prime example of the performance achievements gained from tuning IT for such IO-intensive workloads.“

Blair Bethwaite, senior HPC consultant, Monash eResearch Center, said: “Providing enough scalable object-based storage to meet the capacity needs of our online architecture has been critical for our researchers and our Node of the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (Nectar) research cloud. Monash has worked extensively and successfully with Red Hat Ceph Storage for nearly two years to support a variety of use cases including the Nectar project. We are excited about achieving even greater economies with containerized storage daemons in Red Hat Ceph Storage 3, and new support for iSCSI and CephFS gives us the opportunity to service native Windows research workstations around the campus and offer programmatic access to project-specific file systems in our OpenStack clouds.“

Bryan Thompson, GM, OpenStack private cloud, Rackspace US, Inc. , said: “Rackspace has continued to work with Red Hat to refine and innovate our award-winning Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud powered by Red Hat offering since launching it in February 2016. Red Hat Ceph Storage is an integral part of our private cloud offering. We are excited by the continued innovation in the Ceph project, and the lengths that Red Hat goes to support successful consumption in an enterprise setting.“