Product overview
Organizations are starting to understand the insights and opportunities that effective data management can present to their businesses. More than just accommodating the growing need for storage, data now offers an opportunity to disrupt existing competitive business models by facilitating continuous innovation.
Red Hat® Ceph® Storage provides a robust and compelling data storage solution that can support your data, no matter the format or origin. As a self-healing, self-managing platform with no single point of failure, Red Hat Ceph Storage significantly lowers the cost of storing enterprise data and helps companies manage exponential data growth in an automated fashion. Red Hat Ceph Storage is optimized for large installations—efficiently scaling to multiple petabytes or greater. Unlike traditional network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) approaches, it does not become dramatically more expensive as a cluster grows. Red Hat Ceph Storage also supports increasingly popular containerized environments such as Red Hat OpenShift® Container Platform.
Red Hat Ceph Storage is suitable for a wide range of storage workloads, including:
- Data analytics and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML). As a data lake, Red Hat Ceph Storage uses object storage to deliver massive scalability and high availability to support demanding multitenant analytics and AI/ML workloads.
- Object storage-as-a-service. Red Hat Ceph Storage is ideal for implementing an object storage service, with proven scalability and performance for both small and large object storage.
- Hybrid cloud applications. With support for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) interface, applications can access their storage with the same application programming interface (API)—in public, private, or hybrid clouds.
- OpenStack® applications. Red Hat Ceph Storage offers scalability for OpenStack deployments, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
- Backups. A growing list of software vendors have certified their backup applications with Red Hat Ceph Storage, making it easy to use a single storage technology to serve a wide variety of performance-optimized workloads.
Red Hat Ceph Storage features and benefits
| Component | Capabilities |
| Exabyte scalability | |
| Scale-out architecture | Ability to grow cluster to thousands of nodes without forklift upgrades and data migration projects |
| Automatic rebalancing | Peer-to-peer architecture that seamlessly handles failures and ensures data distribution throughout the cluster |
| Rolling software upgrades | Clusters upgraded in phases with no or minimal downtime |
| API and protocol support | |
| Object, block, and file storage |
Seamless cloud integration with object protocols used by AWS S3 and OpenStack Swift; block storage integrated with OpenStack, Linux®, and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor; CephFS highly available, scale-out shared filesystem for file storage; support for network file system (NFS) v4 and native API protocols |
| RESTful | Ability to manage all cluster and object storage functions programmatically for independence and speed by not having to manually provision storage |
| Multiprotocol with NFS, iSCSI, and object support | Ability to build a common storage platform for multiple workloads and applications |
| Management and security | |
| Automation | Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform-based deployment |
| Management and monitoring | Advanced Ceph monitoring and diagnostic information with integrated on-premise monitoring dashboard and graphical visualization of entire cluster of single components, including cluster and per-node usage and performance statistics |
| Authentication and authorization |
Integration with Microsoft Active Directory, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), AWS Auth v4, and KeyStone v3 |
| Policies | Limit access at pool, user, bucket, or data levels |
| Encryption | Implementation of cluster-wide, at-rest, or user-managed inline object encryption |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Deployment on mature operating system recognized for its high security and backed by a collaborative open source community |
| Reliability and availability | |
| Striping, erasure coding, or replication across nodes | Data durability, high availability, and high performance with support for multisite and disaster recovery |
| Dynamic block sizing | Ability to expand or shrink Ceph block devices with no downtime |
| Storage policies | Configurable data placement to reflect service-level agreements (SLAs), performance requirements, and failure domains using the Controlled Replication Under Scalable Hashing (CRUSH) algorithm |
| Snapshots | Snapshots of an entire pool or individual block devices |
| Support services | SLA-backed technical support with streamlined product and hot-fix patch access. Consulting, service, and training options. |
| Performance | |
| BlueStore backend | Up to 2x performance improvement over the traditional FileStore backend2 |
| Client-cluster data path | Clients share their input/output (I/O) load across the entire cluster |
| Copy-on-write cloning |
Instant provisioning of tens or hundreds of virtual machine instances from the same image |
| In-memory client-side caching | Enhanced client I/O using a hypervisor cache |
| Server-side journaling | Accelerated data write performance with serialized writes |
| Geo replication support and disaster recovery | |
| Zones and regions | Object storage topologies of AWS S3 |
| Global clusters | Global namespace for object users with read and write affinity to local clusters |
| Disaster recovery | Enablement of multisite replication for disaster recovery, data distribution, or archiving |
| Cost-effectiveness | |
| Containerized storage daemons |
Reliable performance, better utilization of cluster hardware, and decreased configuration footprint, with ability to co-locate daemons on the same machine |
| Industry-standard hardware | Optimal price and performance mix of servers and disks tailored to each workload |
| Thin provisioning | Sparse block images enable over-provisioning of cluster and immediate instance creation |
| Heterogeneity | No need to replace older hardware as newer nodes are added |
| Striped erasure coding | Cost-effective data durability option |
Technical requirements
| Description | Minimum requirement |
| Exabyte scalability | |
| Host operating system | • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 and higher • Ubuntu 16.04 |
| Hardware requirements | • Minimum 2-core 64-bit x86 processors per host, minimum of 2GB of RAM per OSD process, 16GB of RAM per monitor host. Minimum 3 storage hosts with 10 recommended |
Singh, Karan. “Red Hat Ceph Storage has a proven scalability to over 1 billion objects.” Red Hat Blog, 13 Feb. 2020.
Meredith, Ryan. “Ceph BlueStore vs. FileStore: Object performance comparison when leveraging Micron NVMe SSDs.” Micron, 29 May 2018.