Prometheus, Grafana, and Ansible rise to the task

with Paul Cuzner (Red Hat)

Managing growth in applications and infrastructure is a significant challenge for many organizations as they scale. Every new application or server that’s added to the environment serves a business requirement, so keeping services usable in today’s 24x7x365 world represents both a challenge and an opportunity to meet a higher service level agreement (SLA).

In part 1 of this series, we discussed a SAAS solution to monitor your Ceph storage infrastructure. In this post, we continue the discussion by talking about how Prometheus, Grafana, and Ansible can rise to the challenge of Ceph monitoring.

Understanding the Ceph monitoring challenge

In the past, monitoring a service typically resulted in separate platforms. In today’s enterprise architectures, however, this is both undesirable and operationally...

with Josh Everett (Red Hat) and Massimo Moran (ARM)

The Dragon Propulsion Laboratory examined in depth the excellent X-Gene ARM chips that were an early entrant on the ARM 64-bit scene and enabled so much of the software-side Linux OS development on ARMv8. More recently, we built a custom cluster in cooperation with Wayne Enterprises that we affectionately refer to as our “Bat Cluster”. In this third blog, we are moving back to the software side of the equation, setting up Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Bat Cluster itself.

Enterprise Bits

Red Hat Enterprise Linux introduced full support for 64-bit ARM with release 7.4 in November of 2017, and while there are many flavors of Linux on ARM, only something as robust and secure as RHEL would do for a sophisticated user like Wayne Enterprises!

The most commonplace strategy for board bring-up on ARM development boards is to use a PXE...

a SAAS solution to monitor your Ceph storage infrastructure

With Ilan Rabinovitch (Datadog)

Monitoring a Distributed System

Red Hat Ceph Storage is a highly scalable, fault-tolerant platform for object, block, and file storage that delivers tremendous data resiliency (we default to keeping three copies of a customer’s data at all times), with service availability capable of enduring the loss of a single drive, of a cluster node, or even of an entire rack of storage without users experiencing any interruption. Like its resiliency, Ceph’s ability to scale to an unprecedented degree is another outcome of its distributed architecture.

Distributed systems architectures break with the common assumptions made by most traditional monitoring tools in defining the health of an individual device or service. In a somewhat obvious example, Nagios’ Red/Green host (or drive) health status...

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.2 brings a new round of enhancements

We are pleased to announce today’s immediate availability of Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.2, our fifteenth RHCS release. There are several highlights with this version, the most notable of which is the introduction of full support for BlueStore. As you definitely already know, BlueStore delivers very significant performance improvements to all Ceph users.

BlueStore

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.2 introduces GA support for the next-generation BlueStore backend. BlueStore delivers a 2X performance improvement for clusters that are HDD-backed, as it removes the so-called double-write penalty that IO-limited storage devices (like hard disk drives) are most affected by. Additionally, BlueStore provides significant performance enhancements in all-SSD configurations, as detailed in our recent whitepaper with Micron. The key highlights of an...

Revisiting the Mustang board two years later, we learned that a few things have changed, and use three of them to build a test storage cluster to try Ceph on ARM — doing a little benchmarking while we are at it.

A New Breed

A newer revision of the Mustang EVK X-Gene 1 development board has relocated some of its ports and added a few more capabilities. The classic board we discussed at length in a previous blog is now identified with the model number 3PBx, whereas the new ones are part of the 3PCx series.

The SATA ports have moved, as you can see in the picture stacking a new board over the older one, and two ethernet ports and the SD card slot have traded places. Besides these cosmetic changes, an additional serial port has been brought out to a connector as UART1 and placed right above good old UART0.

A more substantial change is the adoption of a new UEFI firmware made by...

Kyle Bader and I teamed up to deliver a quick (and hopefully painless) review of what types of storage your Big Data strategy needs to succeed alongside the better-understood (and more traditional) existing approaches to structured data.

Data platform engineers need to receive support from both the Compute and the Storage infrastructure teams to deliver. We look at how the public cloud, and Amazon AWS in particular, tackle these challenges and what are the equivalent technology strategies in OpenStack and Ceph.

Tradeoffs between IO latency, availability of storage space, cost and IO performance lead to storage options fragmenting into three broad solution areas: network-backed persistent block, application-focused object storage (also network based), and directly-attached low-latency NVME storage for highest-performance scratch and overflow space.

Ideally, the infrastructure...

Los Tres Caballeros —sans sombreros— descended on Vancouver this week to participate in the “Rocky” OpenStack Summit. For the assembled crowd of clouderati, Sébastien Han, Sean Cohen and yours truly had one simple question: what if your datacenter was wiped out in its entirety, but your users hardly even noticed?

We have touched on the disaster recovery theme before, but this time we decided to discuss backup as well as HA, which made for a slightly longer talk than we had planned—we hope you enjoyed our “choose your disaster” tour, we definitely enjoyed leading it.

Our session on Ceph disaster recovery in OpenStack also featured unique parenting advice!

The recording of our Summit session is now live on the OpenStack Foundation’s YouTube channel. It is impressive how quickly the Foundation’s media team releases now:

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

Neil, Uday and I joined forces to deliver a roadmap update at the annual Red Hat Summit, hosted this year at Moscone West in San Francisco. But before that, we started the week by running a meeting of the somewhat secretive (and glamorously mysterious) Ceph Advanced User Group, spending Monday hearing what our favorite think-tank had to say about our roadmap plans for the next year.

As always, our slides are available as a PDF download and can be viewed inline below.

Comments? Questions? Ask us on Twitter.

Cryptography made easy…er

Cryptography does not have to be mysterious — as author of Serious Cryptography Jean-Philippe Aumasson points out. It is meant to be fiendishly complex to break, and it remains very challenging to implement (see jokes on rolling your own crypto found all over the Net), but it is well within the grasp of most programmers to understand.

While many are intimidated by the prospect of digging into what is effectively a branch of number theory, the reality is that cryptography is squarely based in discrete mathematics—and good coders are all, without exception and often unknowingly, natural discrete math jugglers. If you are interested and you aced your data structures course, chances are that crypto will not be an unsurmountable challenge to you. Aumasson certainly seems to think so, and he walks us along his own path to the discovery of the cryptographic...

The third one is a charm.

RHCS 3 is our annual major release of Red Hat Ceph Storage and it brings great new features to customers in the areas of containers, usability and raw technology horsepower. It includes support for CephFS, giving us a complete all-in-one storage solution in Ceph spanning block, object and file alike. It introduces iSCSI support to provide storage to platforms like VMWare ESX and Windows Server that currently lack native Ceph drivers. And we are also introducing support for client-side caching with dm-cache.

On the usability front we are introducing new automation to manage the cluster with less user intervention (dynamic bucket sharding), a troubleshooting tool to analyze and flag invalid cluster configurations (Ceph Medic), and a new and rather impressive monitoring dashboard (Ceph Metrics) that brings unparalleled insight into the state of the cluster.