The rise of object storage in the modern datacenter

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 greatly advances object storage capabilities

By Uday Boppana, Red Hat Storage

From speaking with customers across industry verticals and geographies, Red Hat is finding that object storage is increasingly top of mind as enterprises address growing data volumes, regulatory pressure, and threats to data security.

Take financial services firms, for instance. Their IT teams fight multiple fires trying to appease internal and external stakeholders in a fast-moving industry. They are expected to provide lines of business with cost-effective, cloud-like services, from development frameworks, storage backup, archive, to sync and share, while also bridging the traditional in-house banking applications with a plethora of cloud-native applications--and deploying all of them on a single storage platform to reduce costs. Satisfying these challenging goals requires a scalable, on-prem storage platform that can also be extended across hybrid cloud deployments--something that cannot be satisfied through traditional file or block storage solutions.

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 offers a unified, petabyte-scale solution that addresses these pain points. The newest release, announced late last year, adds much in terms of scalability, security features, ease of management, and lowered costs. It also enhances the multiprotocol support for file and  object storage interoperability and migration that was introduced in Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.

Cost-effective private cloud backups

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 helps customers modernize their backup infrastructures and reduce the cost of data backups for private cloud infrastructure through certified interoperability with Veritas NetBackup and Rubrik Cloud Data Management. These software offerings will back up to a Red Hat Ceph Storage cluster using its AWS-compatible S3 API. Details on supported versions are listed in the product’s compatibility guide.

Better scale for file workloads, at lower cost

The benefits of object storage as a data storage platform are well documented, making possible increased reach and applicability of object storage to a variety of workloads. Expanded support of its NFS gateway for RGW to include NFS V3 in addition to V4 means Red Hat Ceph Storage users can now gradually transition most NFS file workloads to a modern, scalable, object storage platform without disruption, with full migration only when their applications, tools, and management processes are ready.

Increased security for data assets

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 enables greater data security for at-rest data and enables permanent data deletion. Object granular encryption is supported for data at-rest using user-provided keys. This functionality can also be used to permanently delete an object by encrypting the object  and shredding the key before deleting the object.

Reduced storage costs by eliminating redundant object data

Inline, object granular compression means being able to eliminate redundant data within an object before saving it to the disk and saving storage costs. The compression operation happens in-line as data is written to RGW from the hosts, before saving it to the disk.

Simpler data lifecycle management

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 eases storage and data management through a policy-based S3 API framework for bucket and object lifecycle management. The Red Hat Ceph Storage object access API is fully compatible with AWS S3 API and now adds support for S3 bucket lifecycle API for object and version expiration.

The web-scale modern datacenter

In sum, as the modern datacenter relies more on web-scale infrastructure, object storage can help organizations bring to bear much of the value in other digital transformation efforts in the development and applications space. As the hybrid cloud becomes a mainstream reality, standardizing on a scalable object-storage solution that can span on-prem, private, and public clouds becomes more imperative to the success of the modern enterprise.

For more on the new and exciting features in Red Hat Ceph Storage 3, check out this blog post by Federico Lucifredi in our "Architects' Corner."