By Chaya Adatrao, Product Marketing @ RedHat

Storage is a foundational component of the cloud.  Choosing an open software-defined storage solution that can scale-out and up to meet the demands of your cloud infrastructure as it grows is critical to avoiding costly re-designs as your workloads and capacity needs grow.

In order to help you to make an informed decision of the storage solution you need to choose, for your OpenStack private and public cloud environments, we at Red Hat engaged Principled Technologies to conduct a head-to-head performance comparison between the leading open software-defined storage platform Red Hat Storage and Ceph, an open-source distributed storage solution. The results reveal that Red Hat Storage delivered over 3x the cloud filesystem performance in tests versus Ceph.

Principled Technologies also compared the scalability of both solutions across multiple physical storage nodes, as well as multiple physical compute clients and virtual machines (one to four nodes and one to 16VMs). They used the RDO distribution for OpenStack .The tests were also conducted on identical hardware systems for both solutions.

Red Hat Storage emerged as a clear winner in the performance and scalability tests on nearly every compute node/VM configuration that Principled Technologies tested. The testing revealed that Red Hat Storage achieved read throughputs of up to 3.8 times greater and write throughputs of up to 2.8 times greater than Ceph Storage in the OpenStack cloud environment. Testing also revealed that performance with Red Hat Storage scaled significantly better than Ceph, making it the better choice for an open-source distributed storage solution for all your private and public cloud needs.

You can find the detailed report from Principled Technologies here.