Storage Tutorial: 2015 IT Predictions with Ceph

Please note: Inktank Ceph has a new name: Red Hat Ceph Storage. Learn more about it, and Red Hat Gluster Storage, here: http://red.ht/1Hw7gYb

Back in April 2014, Red Hat acquired Ceph provider Inktank. Now that the team is a part of Red Hat, we get to pick their brains for thoughts on 2015! To that end, Storage Tutorial Mastermind (and brand manager) Brian Chang sat down with Ross Turk, product marketing manager for Red Hat Storage, Danielle Womboldt, director of marketing for Ceph, and Patrick “Scuttlemonkey” McGarry, community manager for Ceph for their predictions. We’re summarizing it a bit here, but for the entire conversation check out the video below!

Goals for 2015

Ross:

Last year, halfway through, Ceph 1.2 was released. It had new features such as cached tiering and erasure coding. This year the focus is going to be solidly on stability, reliability, packaging, quality assurance. And also spending a lot of time thinking about what it means to be part of a portfolio that includes a product such as Gluster.

Danielle:

From a marketing perspective, we’re trying to keep the coolness and uniqueness that Inktank brought to Ceph. And also looking to keep a separate user community.

Patrick:

From the community, we can declare this the year of CephFS.

We had a lot of community/partner participation that has gone a long way for tuning and performance. We’re expecting amazing advancements in tuning and performance across the entire Ceph platform, not just CephFS — hardware integrations such as with Ethernet drives, flash storage stuff and networking hardware. Lot’s of partners are working to ensure their products work with Ceph.

A prediction

Patrick:

We’ll see an industry evolution as people think about things like Ceph — OpenStack, CloudStack’s. We’ll start to see a paradigm shift in how developers treat their infrastructure.

And watching OpenStack blossom will be fun in 2015.

Segue: Ceph and OpenStack

Brian:

2015 will be a defining year for OpenStack — why is Ceph the de facto storage backend for it?

Ross:

It’s interesting to watch over the years how the Ceph and OpenStack community have worked in parallel. The last OpenStack user survey showed that Ceph was the leading distributed storage platform for OpenStack. But an interesting thing happened, in the most recent survey is that Ceph is more popular than the default — Directly Attached Storage.

The way you manage Ceph and OpenStack are similar — they are both software. It isn’t like a cloud architect deploying OpenStack and calling an IT department to get a proprietary client set up for storage for virtual machines…it can be used with the same hardware profile that can be used for OpenStack.

What’s coming for the Ceph community in 2015?

Danielle:

Ceph days! The global Ceph day program will be exciting. Six Ceph Days were run in 2014. Highlights include over 100 attendees in each city, over 100 presentations to the community. These bring together experts, partners, and the community. We’re planning to have even more in 2015 and will be rolled out across the globe, and one each month this year.

On to the video

To learn what cities Ceph Days may be coming to, and to hear about plans for the next Google Summer of Code, get that video below going now!