The value of on-premise object storage

The recent outage of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 offering has likely reminded customers of the old "too many eggs in one basket" adage, sparking reviews of where and how they deploy and manage their storage. Outages of this magnitude illustrate how much data lives in object storage these days.

Object storage has come to be the foundation for web-scale architectures in public or private clouds, as we’ve previously discussed. Its allure is due to its potential to handle massive scale while minimizing complexity and cost. Customers struggling with large-scale data storage deployments are turning to object storage to overcome the limitations that legacy storage systems face at scale (typically degradation of performance).

Object storage allows application developers and users to focus more on their workflow and logic and not worry about handling file storage and file locations. However, the large extent of outages due to the unavailability of AWS S3 shows the dependence that so many businesses have on public-cloud-based object storage today.

Ceph is an object store at its core and was designed for web-scale applications. Running Red Hat Ceph Storage on premises offers customers a more secure, cost-effective, and performant way to manage large amounts of data without the risks that can be associated with public-cloud-based solutions.

The S3 API has become the de facto standard for accessing data in object stores, and organizations now develop and demand applications that “speak” S3. Applications that use the S3 API can more easily migrate between on-premise, private clouds built on Red Hat Ceph Storage and public clouds like AWS just by changing the storage endpoint network address. This enables them to operate on both datasets that are present in private clouds and those stored in the public cloud. A common API for object storage means that applications can move between these two cloud deployment models, managing data consistently wherever they go.

For a recent customer example using Red Hat Ceph Storage at scale for object storage, check out our recently published success story with the CLIMB project in the U.K.

Hopefully, most of you reading this were not stung by the recent outage. Regardless, now is as good a time as any to review your infrastructure to determine if an on-premise object storage approach with Red Hat Ceph Storage makes sense. We think it does!