Red Hat Storage outperforms Ceph by more than 2x using small-file IO workloads for OpenStack Clouds

by Chaya Adatrao, Product Marketing

Today, enterprises considering moving to cloud environments are in need of open software-defined storage solutions that meet the demands of unprecedented data growth while also providing agility, preventing vendor lock-in, improving operational efficiencies and reducing costs.  In addition, choosing the right solution that delivers optimal performance in highly scalable distributed storage environments is also imperative.

In November last year, Red Hat engaged Principled Technologies to conduct a performance comparison study of Red Hat Storage vs Inktank Ceph in OpenStack environments. That study focused on sequential workloads and revealed that Red Hat Storage outperformed Ceph by more than 3x.

Principled Technologies has now extended the performance comparison study to small-file workloads and found that Red Hat Storage once again outperformed Ceph by delivering up to 2.2x the performance versus Ceph.

Principled Technologies compared the relative performance of Red Hat Storage and Ceph Storage (using the smallfile benchmark tool), along with the scalability of both solutions using one to four nodes, one to 16VMs, and four to 64 threads. They used identical hardware and a random exponential distribution of file sizes (as supported by ‘smallfile’ tool) to provide a distribution of file sizes similar to what many real-world virtualized, multi-tenant environments would use. The smallfile tool simulated users performing operations on their files, such as, create, read, delete, rename and append, to show the kind of end-user performance you could expect using both solutions at various node, VM, and thread counts

Red Hat Storage Server once again emerged a clear winner in these tests by handling up to two times the number of files per second in various instances, making it the best choice for an open-source distributed storage solution for your OpenStack cloud environments. You can find the details of the report here.