Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 introduces new object storage features

Red Hat, the provider of open source solutions, has announced Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, the next generation of its open software-defined storage platform. Ceph was designed from the ground up to enable and support enterprises' digital transformation efforts through Web scale object and cloud infrastructures. As an object storage solution, it is well-suited for enterprises with deployments approaching a petabyte of data or more. 

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, Storage, Red Hat said, “This latest version of the product is the most significant update to Red Hat Ceph Storage since we acquired Inktank in 2014. We believe our customers will find Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 to be a full-featured, technically advanced storage platform that’s easy to use and helps them manage vast quantities of data at the enterprise level. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, combined with Red Hat’s broad services and support offerings, gives customers a strong foundation to enable their digital transformation.” 

Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, based on the Ceph Jewel release, introduces several new capabilities that enhance support for object storage workloads and promote greater ease of use. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 brings enhanced capabilities for enterprise object storage customers who are demanding scale, increased security, and strong compatibility with industry-standard APIs.

New object storage features in Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 include:

 New global object storage clusters, which provide a single namespace and data synchronisation between clusters operating in multiple regions. 

 Improved security via integration with authentication systems, including Active Directory, LDAP, and OpenStack Identity (Keystone) v3. 

 Enhanced Amazon S3 and OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) compatibility, including support for AWS v4 Client Signatures, object versioning, bulk deletes, and more.

Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 also debuts Red Hat Storage Console 2, a storage management and monitoring system with a redesigned, streamlined user interface. This new technology simplifies both the deployment and operational management of Ceph, making scale-out storage accessible to a wider range of users while reducing deployment time from days to hours in tests conducted by Red Hat. Building on Ansible as a foundation, Red Hat Storage Console 2 delivers a single, clean, and modern graphical interface to proactively monitor and manage health, performance, and capacity utilisation.

Red Hat also announced a tech preview of CephFS, the POSIX-compliant file system that uses a Ceph storage cluster to store its data and can be used with the OpenStack Manila service. This is a continuation of Red Hat’s ongoing commitment to complete and tightly integrated storage for OpenStack environments. 

"Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 is a powerful, scalable and unified software-defined storage platform that has enabled us to liberate data services to the many and varied needs of researchers. With Red Hat Ceph Storage, the problem of taming and retaining vast amounts of research data is no longer a grand-challenge, and as a testament to that scalability we have built the largest Ceph deployment in the southern hemisphere," said Blair Bethwaite, Senior HPC consultant, Monash eResearch Centre, part of Australia's Monash University. 

"Using Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 we are able to manage massive workloads encompassing 5 petabytes of data in a single infrastructure. We would not have been able to achieve this without the block and object storage capabilities of Red Hat's solution, we look forward to adding several petabytes of new storage in Q3 and trialling CephFS with this featurepacked new release." 

Added Greg Lissy, VP, enterprise product management, Citrix: “Citrix is committed to supporting our customers by enabling them to more securely access their data regardless of the storage infrastructure they choose. By collaborating with Red Hat and certifying Red Hat Ceph Storage for use with Citrix ShareFile, we continue to develop solutions that help our customers embrace digital business transformation, all while remaining competitive.”

James Mouton, VP and GM, Dell Extreme Scale Infrastructure said, “Dell continues to partner with Red Hat in developing next-generation, cost-effective storage solutions in our Extreme Scale Infrastructure and OpenStack Cloud solutions with Red Hat Ceph Storage 2. Our DSS 7000 server, with its massive 720TB capacity in a single 4U chassis and one or two addressable servers, offers ideal flexibility for multi-petabyte scale-out and archival storage making use of Ceph's enhanced object storage feature set.”

"Combining two of the most disruptive approaches to storage today, our ongoing collaborations with Red Hat including work with Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 can be viewed as a win-win for OpenStack datacenter managers by delivering scalable all-flash storage solutions that provide extremely high IOPS, low latency and exceptional reliability. We see the software-defined ecosystem as an integral part of the enterprise storage business and plan to continue to work very closely with Red Hat to develop the best possible storage systems for next-generation OpenStack enterprise workloads,” Jim Elliott, Corporate VP, Memory Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor said.   

"Sandisk has performed an expansive amount of performance characterisation testing with Red Hat targeted for Red Hat Ceph Storage deployments that need higher IOPS," said Gary Lyng, Senior Director, DCS Marketing, Western Digital. "The latest testing of InfiniFlash System IF150 by Sandisk with Red Hat Ceph Storage has shown it can provide more than one million random read input/output operations per second (IOPS) – opening up a whole new set of potential workloads for private cloud and scale out storage."

Interested?

Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 is scheduled for availability this summer (roughly Q2 to Q3).