Lenovo Ceph Storage Solutions Powered by ThinkSystem Ready Nodes

By Ben Blomberg, product Marketing, Lenovo Group Ltd.

IT leaders face a myriad of challenges, soaring data volumes, escalating complexity, and mounting storage expenses. Managing diverse protocols and storage systems adds another layer of complexity, especially as skilled IT personnel become scarce and costly. Compounding these issues is the looming threat of ransomware attacks and other risks to data security.

Change history:
Changes in the August 30, 2024 update:

• Updated processor details under Minimum Hardware Configurations section:
  • Xeon Gold 32C 2.1GHz processor

Lenovo Ceph Storage solutions
Lenovo Ceph Storage Solutions are an answer to those critical storage challenges. Integrating IBM Storage Ceph with Lenovo ThinkSystem Ready Nodes, these pre-configured, validated, and fully supported solutions allow organizations to prioritize core business operations and avoiding risk and complexity. With consolidated support for block, file, and object storage, Ceph storage eliminates data silos while preserving cost efficiencies at scale and data sovereignty.

A validated design provides 24×7 support, enhancing security and reliability. In partnership with IBM Corp., Lenovo delivers the benefits of open-source storage with enterprise-grade confidence and support.

Key features:

• Enterprise support: Available 24x7x365 with Lenovo Premier support
• Scalability: Non-disruptively grow from one to hundreds of petabytes
• Cost-effective: At scale, implementing software-defined storage reduces TCO
• Validated design: Easy to configure and order with proven performance and manageability
• Security: Enterprise grade data protection and data governance

Lenovo Ceph Storage Solutions are designed to tackle the most pressing storage obstacles faced by organizations. Integrating IBM Storage Ceph with Lenovo ThinkSystem Ready Nodes, these validated, and fully supported solutions empower organizations to prioritize core business operations efficiently knowing they have a secure enterprise solution with 24×7 support.

Central to its capabilities is a resilient scale-out architecture, operating as a self-repairing, self-administering distributed object repository. This framework guarantees exceptional adaptability and dependability with ease of management. By integrating block, file, and object storage protocols, Ceph Storage eliminates data segregation while preserving cost-effectiveness at scale and data control.

Together, Lenovo and IBM, deliver a world-class open-source solution supporting large data sets with support.

Lenovo Ceph Storage solutions use cases:

• Data Lakehouse for AI Workloads
  As AI becomes integrated into more routine business processes, organizations increasingly require access to massive and continually expanding repositories of diverse datasets. And they need data management tools for control over the content of the datasets, where the data is stored, who has access, the regulatory and compliance requirements, and more. A data lakehouse is a modern data architecture that combines the key benefits of data lakes (large repositories of raw data in its original form) and data warehouses (organized sets of structured data). Now organizations can deploy quickly yet still scale massively combining an open, hybrid, fit-for-purpose data store. Lenovo Ceph Storage Solutions are capable of handling large, diverse datasets while providing flexibility, scalability, and compliance with regulatory requirements, thereby supporting business growth and operational efficiency.
• Object Storage-as-a-Service
  Lenovo Ceph Storage Solutions delivers object storage as-a-service for applications such as analytics and data pipelines, online archives, backup targets, disaster recovery, and enterprise file sharing. Many such applications now use object storage because of their cost-efficient and secure design, concurrent multi-user access, and the ability to scale to large capacity and performance requirements. These solutions are a fit in these environments as Ceph supports concurrent data access from multiple applications, multiple systems, and multiple locations in secure repositories or buckets. They are a versatile, cost-efficient, secure, and scalable solution that can support concurrent multi-user access, accommodate large-scale data requirements, and provide data governance meeting the diverse storage demands of modern enterprises effectively.
• Cloud-native applications using S3 API
  As a data lake, they deliver scalability and HA to support demanding multitenant analytics and AI/ML workloads. With high fidelity compatibility to the Amazon AWS S3 interface, applications can access their storage with the same application API, in public, private, or hybrid clouds. Lenovo Ceph flexibility in cloud deployment and operational efficiency through seamless integration with S3, caters to the diverse storage needs and deployment preferences of modern organizations and cloud service providers.
• Virtual private clouds and container management platforms
  Ceph is a proven cloud storage solution that has evolved into the leading storage platform for OpenStack-based virtual private Clouds (VPCs) and for OpenShift Container Platform. A reliable, leading-edge solution that integrates seamlessly with cloud and container platforms, offering organizations scalability, compatibility, and a cost-effective storage management solution.

Ceph protocol support

Object storage

• AWS S3 Supports all common AWS S3 bucket and object API calls
• Advanced S3 features such as object versioning, object lock, S3-select with table format support (Apache Parquet, CSV and JSON)
• OpenStack Swift Compatible with the OpenStack Swift object storage API

Block storage

• Supports NVMe/TCP block protocol, VMware ESXi 7.0U3 and 8.0+
• Supports latency-sensitive applications running on operating systems that support NVMe/TCP
• Ceph RBD, Block storage access through the native Ceph RBD client part of RHEL or OpenStack. Used for KVM/QEMU virtual machine workloads and native Linux applications requiring TCP/IP-accessible block storage

File storage

• NFSv3 and NFSv4, Export of CephFS volumes and sub-volumes via NFSv3 and NFS v4.1
• NFSv4 gateway to object storage, support for data ingest and export of object storage data via NFS share
• CephFS, export of CephFS volumes and sub-volumes via native Linux kernel or FUSE client running on RHEL or other Linux distribution

Container storage

• Kubernetes CSI-drivers, supports CephFS and Ceph RBD CSI-drivers to provide persistent storage for containers

Minimum hardware configurations

HS350X V3, for capacity, backup, archive, media

• Xeon Gold 32C 2.1GHz Processor
• 24×3.5” HDD (8, 12, 16, 22TB SATA)
• 2xNVMe (for metadata)
• 10/25GbE

SR650 V3, for performance / data and AI / lakehouse

• Xeon Gold 32C 2.1GHz Processor
• 28xNVMe (TLC- 3.8, 7.7, and 15.4TB or QLC- 15.4 and 30.7TB)
• 10/25GbE, 100GbE

IBM Storage Ceph software
IBM Storage Ceph Premium Edition is available as a subscription license for object only or as unified (block, file, and object) solution.

Both offerings include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server operating system software license to support Ceph.
• IBM Storage Insights provides a view of storage resources from the server, application, network, and file system perspective.
• 24x7x365 software support

Minimum recommended configuration
The following table lists the minimum recommended configuration for a Lenovo Ceph Storage solution.

Table 1. Lenovo Ceph Storage solutions

Notes: Engage a Lenovo storage specialist for sizing

Resources:
ThinkSystem HS350X V3 Storage Server     
ThinkSystem SR650 V3 Server