A Look at Ceph Storage 5

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 and erasure coding support.
• Broadened Rados Block Device (RBD) functionality includes snapshot-based mirroring for DR and cluster-migration capabilities.

Enhancements #

Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 includes a number of enhancements and improvements:

Security #

Security enhancements include the ability to limit use of cryptographic modules to those certified to the FIPS 140-2 standard. This is possible when Ceph Storage is deployed in combination with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release that is FIPS 140-2 certified. See this post about how RHEL 8 is can meet FIPS 140-2 requirements to learn more.

External key management integration capabilities now include support for KMIP-compatible servers alongside HashiCorp Vault and the OpenStack Barbican service. Most notably, the introduction of write-once, read-many capabilities opens new use cases where strict object storage data governance is required.

Performance and scale #

A streamlined LibRBD implementation with a new caching architecture provides a significant performance boost in the block interface backing OpenStack’s virtualization. Additionally, better internal allocation delivers more economical use of space across object, file, and block alike— providing 16X higher density on hard disk drives (HDD) and 4x on solid state devices (SDD, NVME) where small files under 64KB are in use. Scaling into tens of billions of objects, and proven in tests encompassing data ingestion, Ceph Storage has established a new milestone for object storage with a cluster of just 10 nodes.

Integration with Red Hat portfolio products #

Red Hat Ceph Storage is more than just a software defined storage solution. It is the foundational layer for Red Hat Data Services solutions, embedded as the heart of Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, offering reliable, stable and performant storage for the required storage types that OpenShift applications need: persistent storage for block, file and S3 object storage, without a need to have to maintain different storage silos for each type.
A single Red Hat Ceph Storage installation can provide persistent storage to multiple OpenShift clusters, materially simplifying storage team operations.

Business benefits #

Red Hat Ceph Storage offers improved economics over traditional storage alternatives. With this new release, customers can enjoy the benefit of a lower component footprint cost and improved reliability at the same time. Red Hat Ceph Storage helps organizations to start small and scale out whenever there is a business need to expand both storage capacity and performance.

Red Hat Ceph Storage brings along better data availability and improved accessibility. Data can easily be made accessible at multiple locations and is highly available and highly resilient within any single site.

Use cases #

With Red Hat Ceph Storage, customers can:

• Scale operations incrementally and move to market faster.
• Bridge gaps between application development and data science teams.
• Gain deeper insights into their data.

Red Hat Ceph Storage provides a robust and compelling data storage solution that can support your data storage needs, no matter the format or origin.
As a self-healing, self-managing platform with no single point of failure, Red Hat Ceph Storage can help significantly lower the cost of storing enterprise data and helps companies manage exponential data growth smoothly, in an automated fashion.
Red Hat Ceph Storage is optimized for large installations — scaling to tens of petabytes, with increasing, not declining, performance. Unlike traditional network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) approaches, it does not become dramatically more expensive as a cluster grows. Red Hat Ceph Storage can also support persistent storage workloads running on Red Hat’s industry-leading Kubernetes distribution, OpenShift Container Platform.

Workloads and use cases #

Red Hat Ceph Storage is suitable for a wide range of storage workloads, including:

• Data analytics and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) #

  As a data lake, Red Hat Ceph Storage uses object storage to deliver massive scalability and high availability to support demanding multitenant analytics and AI/ML workloads.

• Object storage-as-a-service #

  Red Hat Ceph Storage is ideal for implementing an on-premise object storage service, with proven scalability and performance for both small and large object storage.

• Hybrid cloud applications #

  With support for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) interface, applications can access their storage with the same application programming interface (API)—in public, private, or hybrid clouds.

• OpenStack applications #

  Red Hat Ceph Storage offers scalability for OpenStack deployments, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

• Disaster Recovery and Backup #

  A growing list of software vendors have certified their backup applications with Red Hat Ceph Storage, making it easy to use a single storage technology to serve a wide variety of performance-optimized workloads.

The rising tide of software-defined storage #

With a sizable customer base of thousands of supported customers, collectively deploying several hundred petabytes of storage, a dynamic, international community of more than 300 developers spanning the US, Germany, China, India, and many other countries just recently that just recently contributed more than half a million lines in code additions and changes, Ceph has risen to claim the top spot among software-defined storage solutions with surveyed Community deployments approaching one exabyte.

Supporting the premier Open Source hybrid cloud platforms for container- and virtualization based computing, as well as what are some of the largest AWS S3-compatible, on-premise deployments of storage in the world, Ceph is living up to its moniker as the future of storage.

Get started with Red Hat Ceph Storage #

Red Hat Ceph Storage is a proven reliable storage solution, offered by Red Hat since 2014.

With Red Hat Ceph Storage, customers have a modern, highly scalable and flexible enterprise storage environment that can serve a variety of actual business data- and workload needs, regardless whether these needs concern file, block or object storage.
Red Hat offers enterprise support, as well as optional educational and consulting services to our customers. More information about Red Hat Ceph Storage is available in this brief document.

Get started with Red Hat Ceph Storage here or get in touch with Red Hat by clicking here.

Cross-posted to the Red Hat Blog.