My 44th release of Ceph since we started enterprise-class product releases is now on the wire, and a little celebration is in order.

This June, we have a special release of Ceph. As Josh and I first announced a year ago at the OpenInfra Summit’s State of the Cephalopod, and was then introduced in Tech Preview with 7.0 in December, we have a major addition to the Ceph family of protocols with the arrival of the newfangled NVMEoF Gateway.

Building Blocks

Adding NVME over TCP to our supported protocols suite gives us a way to provision our Ceph block storage where LibRBD and kRBD (or NBD) native drivers do not reach yet — notably, VMware. With the addition of a vSphere plugin we borrowed from the IBM FlashSystem team, NVMEoF is well-integrated with the world’s favorite virtualization platform, and aims to be the rising challenger in the arena of Software-Defined storage solutions for...

This June, we restored the tradition of the annual upstream + downstream “State of the Cephalopod” talk that Sage Weil and I used to present to Red Hat Summit customers annually. Many things have changed since, but now that the travel situation has normalized it is time we restored old traditions.

Josh and I have been working closely since 2015, but amusingly this is the first time we give a talk together! I think we did honor to the tradition, and we shed some light on the IBM transition and continued state of Red Hat Storage’s Ceph products.

Our slides are available as a PDF and can be viewed inline below.

We also hosted a Ceph Day in Vancouver on the very next day of the OpenInfra Summit, and it was a resounding success, at times we were the busiest track at the Summit. I took the opportunity to present the latest revision of our Ceph Security tutorial — I was a bit jet...

The Storage Engineering team at Bloomberg graciously hosted our first Ceph Days event of the year in their New York City offices. The event was an absolute blast, it was great to see so many Community members and even colleagues face to face again after such a long forced pause, and everyone gave their level best to make this a near-perfect event.

Sage and I joined a very illustrious roster of presenters, and presented our workshop to an unusually security-focused audience — and had some interesting questions to answer from the assembled audience.

The media team at Bloomberg did a really excellent job of recording every session. Our caffeinated security workshop follows:

Our slides are available as a PDF and can be viewed inline below.

Making Ceph failed disk replacement seamless

with Sebastian Wagner (Red Hat), Paul Cuzner (Red Hat), and Ernesto Puerta Treceno (Red Hat)

Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 introduces cephadm, a new integrated control plane that is part of the storage system itself, and enjoys a complete understanding of the cluster’s current state — something that external tools could not quite achieve as well because of their external nature. Among its many advantages, cephadm unified control of the state of a storage cluster significantly simplifies operations.

Replacing failed drives made easy

For example, the older process to replace drives in ceph-ansible required multiple steps and running processes enforcing configuration on all nodes when what was desired was updating only one node’s configuration. Managing around drive encryption would at times involve further complexity.

New ways: replacing a

This October, Ana McTaggart, Michael Hackett and myself presented a fast-paced security overview of all things Ceph and Rook at the newfangled CNCF Security Conference.

This was a mixed virtual and in-person event. We elected to go virtual, but we saw from pictures the in-person session was well attended, despite travel restrictions. Yay vaccines!

Due to the virtual format, this talk was pre-recorded and I presented at a brisk pace. This inevitably happens when it is late in the evening and I had too much caffeine. Have some coffee yourself, then listen to the recording:

Our slides are available as a PDF and can be viewed inline below — we are very interested in your feedback and comments or any unanswered questions you may have. Find me on Twitter and share your thoughts!

Comments? Discuss on Hacker News.

Introducing the Pacific codebase of Red Hat’s flagship storage product

with Marcel Hergaarden (Red Hat)

Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 is now generally available. This release includes support for NFSv4, additional disaster recovery capabilities for CephFS and RBD, as well as new security features and performance improvements.

New features

Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 introduces significant new functionality in several key areas:

• The new, integrated Cephadm control plane and newly-stable management API lay a foundation for customized automation. With these improvements we avoid requiring mastery of a DevOps configuration system to deploy and manage Ceph clusters.
  
• CephFS now supports the NFS 4 protocol, enabling AI/ML workloads requiring a filesystem interface alongside object storage. CephFS is also adding geo-replication capabilities for disaster-recovery (DR) multi-cluster configurations...

The Pacific Ocean spans a quarter of the Earth’s surface. While our ambitions for Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 are slightly smaller, it is only just so. Releasing RHCS 5 today on Mary Shelley’s day is a fitting tribute to the amazing creative effort of the more than 195 people who worked on the product directly — and the many, many others who did so indirectly as part of the largest Open Source Community any enterprise storage product enjoys.

UX at the Shell: Cephadm

RHCS 5 maintains compatibility with existing Ceph installations while enhancing Ceph’s overall manageability. Further extending the management user interface introduced last year to provide operators with better oversight of their storage clusters, RHCS 5 does not require mastering the internal details of the RADOS distributed system, further lowering the learning curve to SDS adoption. Operators can manage storage volumes...

with Sage Weil (Red Hat)

Sage and I renewed the now annual tradition of delivering a recorded roadmap session for the Red Hat Summit virtual audience. This year, we have been selected for the launch of Red Hat TV, which will happen later this summer, so our session’s release may be delayed, becoming available at a time separate from the virtual Red Hat Summit event itself.

I covered the upcoming Red Hat Ceph Storage 5, based on upstream’s Pacific release, and Sage illustrated the Community plans for the Quincy release coming next year. We tried to compensate for the lack of interaction by packing a lot of material for the attendees of the session, so brew a cup of tea and block your calendar, because you will need a full hour to go through all that we are throwing at you!

Our slides are available as a PDF and can be viewed inline below — we are not including our backup slides...

The Red Hat Ceph Storage life cycle: upgrade scenarios and long-lived deployments

with Sean Murphy (Red Hat)

Different industries have varying requirements for the software systems on which their respective businesses rely. Some operators choose to quickly embrace the latest and greatest release when facing change and integration updates. Others defer upgrades for as long as possible, trying to continue on a tried-and-true combination of software components until end-of-support (or security patching) forces a change.

The distinction is somewhat artificial, as most operators really adopt a combination of the two strategies for different parts of their infrastructure. The Red Hat Ceph Storage life cycle aims to address both faster and slower movers. In this post, we’ll share how we’re helping customers stay current while also providing longer life cycle options where needed.

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