By Daniel Gilfix, Red Hat Storage

For the second year in a row, Red Hat Ceph Storage has been named as a finalist in Storage Magazine and SearchStorage’s 2017 Products of the Year competition. Whereas in 2016, the honor was bestowed upon what was arguably the most important product release since Ceph came aboard the Red Hat ship, this year’s candidate was Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3, a point release. This means a lot to us, but as a reader—perhaps a current or prospective customer, why should you care?

Excellent question, I must say, since normally we don’t like to boast. Our focus here at Red Hat is on the needs, experiences, and ultimate satisfaction of those who use our solutions. And given the evolution of Red Hat Ceph Storage from its acquisition from Inktank, the storage vendor, to Red Hat, the IT vendor, one would hope that we’re making progress.

Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conflict_Resolution_in_Human_Evolution.jpg

The fact that Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 was recognized as among those reflecting the latest trends in flash, cloud, and container technologies is a good sign that this is true. More important validation, however, comes from customers like Produban and UK Cloud, who are incorporating the product into broad Red Hat solutions. It also comes from those like Monash University and CLIMB, who can appreciate improvements to versatility, connectivity, and flexibility, like the NFS gateway to an S3-compatible object interface, compatibility testing with the Hadoop S3A plugin, and a containerized version of the product.

Even more uplifting from a user perspective today is the fact that v2.3 has already been superseded by Red Hat Ceph Storage 3, a more substantive advance into the realm of object storage that addresses a few key customer requirements while making adoption less challenging. For example, the product rounded its value as a cost and resource-saving unified storage platform with full support for file-based access (CephFS) and links to legacy storage environments through iSCSI. Containerization was advanced to include CSDs, enabling nearly 25% hardware deployment savings and more predictable performance through the co-location of storage daemons. And we added a snazzy new monitoring interface and additional layers of automation to make deployments more self-maintaining. According to Olivier Delachapelle, Head of Data Center Category Management EMEIA at Fujitsu, “Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 is probably the most advanced software-defined storage solution combining extreme scalability, inherent disaster resilience, and significant price-capacity value.”     

Snapshot of Red Hat Ceph Storage management console, top-level interface

In the end, we feel good about the public recognition, but we feel even better when our customers and partners are happy and have what they need to succeed. I encourage you to share your thoughts about where we’re on target and/or perhaps missing the boat. Ultimately, being part of an IT company means our storage solution can serve a role that was perhaps unimaginable before, and it supports our commitment to real-world deployment of the future of storage.