Welcome to Red Hat Storage Nation, SanDisk!

By Daniel Gilfix, Red Hat Storage

Those of you familiar with Red Hat Storage might remember that our mission is to offer, with our partners, a unified, open, software-defined storage portfolio for next-generation workloads that helps accelerate the transition to modern IT infrastructures. The recent news with SanDisk affirms our commitment to this mission. Our newly found friendship with one of the global leaders in flash storage is predicated upon extending Red Hat Ceph Storage to even further heights, and it demonstrates how open source software benefits not only from the innovation of those in the community but also from an open commercial ecosystem that traditional solutions are hard-pressed to duplicate.

Joining forces with another product giant

The Kelpies, at the Helix, Scotland, downloaded from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kelpies

On the heels of the Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3.2 point release–one stealthily promoted yet proudly delivered with management, security, and performance upgrades–we’ve formalized a strategic alliance with SanDisk aimed at supporting the scalability and performance needs of enterprise customers. The combined solution, which incorporates Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the SanDisk InfiniFlash™ system, has been optimized and tested to offer high density and peak performance at scale.

Taking aim at joint customer pain points

The motivation between such an alliance stems from a common understanding of what our customers need and how satisfying these needs is essential for next-generation storage in a software-defined datacenter. We’re talking about applications requiring high performance and low latency, like demanding OpenStack cloud platforms, large-scale Splunk log analytics, high-speed messaging servers, and read-intensive apps that process large amounts of data. We’re talking about customers deploying multiple storage solutions for different classes of applications at the risk of over-provisioning hard disk drives (HDDs) to meet SLAs and exceeding their capacity, space, power, and cooling capabilities. We’re talking about increasingly scrutinized budgets, cost containment, and the pressure to achieve economies of scale in datacenter operations.

One and one equals three!

Red Hat and SanDisk knew that our respective solutions delivered bona fide business benefits for storage customers, but together, we had the best of both worlds. We simply needed to document the configurations, certify compatibility, and provide basic training on our respective products to SanDisk Global Customer Care and Red Hat Global Support Services.

The result is nothing short of “performance that scales” in an integrated, single-platform solution. Red Hat Ceph Storage and SanDisk’s InfiniFlash System offer petabyte-scale capacity, high density, and performance, which can yield powerful cost-economies for our joint customers with big data storage requirements. The combination delivers the performance of an all-flash array with the economics of an HDD-based system and the scalability and versatility of a Red Hat Ceph Storage software-defined storage platform. Our customers can apply it not only to integrated OpenStack environments but a wide array of workloads in medium to large deployments.

We encourage customers to seek more information about this offering from their Red Hat or SanDisk sales reps and to consider how the combined benefits of Ceph and flash storage might help their organizations. At the same time, let’s give a shout out to our friends at SanDisk for joining us as part of the Red Hat Storage Nation and setting the bar even higher for next-generation, scale-out storage.

Screaming Seagull by Vera Kratochvil, available on PublicDomainPictures.net
(http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?large=1&image=8345)