College of Education at University of Hawaii at Manoa Deploys Ceph Storage

Inktank Storage, Inc. announced that the College of Education at University of
Hawaii at Manoa has deployed the Ceph software-defined
storage system.

Inktank collaborated with their partner, Mirantis, Inc., a
large OpenStack systems integrator, to deploy a private cloud
infrastructure running Ceph for the College of Education research organization.

Faculty wanted to be able to spin up new servers and the
university IT staff decided to deploy an infrastructure cloud to meet this
growing demand. Because information security is critical in a university
setting, public cloud storage was not an option.

The College of Education team was using Ubuntu Linux as their OS of choice, and
chose OpenStack for their private cloud platform. The team met with some
daunting challenges when trying to implement a proprietary scale-out disk
array storage solution as part of their OpenStack deployment. Partnering with
Inktank and Mirantis, they decided to deploy a pilot cluster of Ceph with some
new commodity hardware. This partnership resulted in the deployment of OpenStack with Caeph that spanned not only the new commodity
hardware, but also repurposed the disk array hardware into the Ceph cluster. As
a result, the team was able to leverage unutilized hardware from the previous
storage project to provide a Ceph storage cluster that is four times bigger
than expected with no additional hardware cost.

"With Ceph, we have unlimited flexibility in our topology. Switching
from proprietary systems to open source has been so much more collaborative,
enabling us to get much more than we hoped from the initial project. It has
been a win-win," said Stephan Fabel, technical lead, College of
Education, University of Hawaii. "We really like GPL/LGPL licensing,
and we believe that ‘free’ open source means better collaboration."

"The University of Hawaii’s Ceph deployment is a great example of how higher
education can take advantage of OpenStack and Ceph technology to
cost-effectively satisfy faculty research compute and storage demand,"
said Bryan Bogensberger, CEO, Inktank. "In this instance Inktank and
Mirantis worked together to deliver a Ceph Storage backed private cloud that
will meet the university’s storage needs both now and in the future. We are
excited to continue to expand our partnership with Mirantis to enable the
widespread adoption of Ceph integrated with OpenStack around the world."