Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Ceph Storage 3, a major upgrade to its massively scalable, software-defined object storage platform, with the introduction of support for block storage via iSCSI and file storage via CephFS. With these additions, Red Hat 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.
Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 builds on Red Hat’s years of leadership in object storage, enables more robust and better performance at scale, and introduces the ability to deploy storage in containers for greater cost-savings and operational efficiencies.
Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 includes the following highlights:
- Enables a large variety of storage needs in OpenStack, helping enterprises fully 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 Red Hat 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 Storage Area Networks (SAN).
- Deploys enterprise storage in Linux containers for simplified operations and a smaller hardware footprint. Containerized storage daemons enable users to run Red Hat 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 Red Hat Ceph Storage cluster configuration showed lowered hardware expenditure by at least 24 percent. This is particularly relevant to telco customers, such as those implementing NFVi, who struggle with hardware and space constraints.
Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 also aims to significantly 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 new 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.
