Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.1 - Rolling down the tracks of Jewel

Three months after the release of Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, we’re proud to announce the first update to our Ceph Jewel-based product with Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.1.

For the 2.1 release, like version 1.3.3, we're continuing a “train model” in software development. By fixing the release date and pushing out features that aren’t ready until later, we can deliver the latest versions of stable, upstream Ceph code to Red Hat customers on a faster, more predictable schedule and thereby empower customers to plan their upgrades with greater confidence.

What's in it?

Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.1 is based on Ceph Jewel v10.2.3. Two new features may be of particular interest to service providers using Ceph as an object store:

• Static web sites: Allows users to host static content, such as HTML or media objects, in RGW objects and have them served as fully functional web sites.
• S3 payer-request API: Allows users hosting content to have content requesters pay for the network usage fees associated with delivery. This is well-suited for hosting large binary content without being penalized as the originator of the content.

In addition, users who need to keep a large number of objects in one bucket will appreciate indexless buckets. As the name implies, the Ceph Rados Gateway (RGW) can be configured not to maintain an index, which can significantly increase performance by skipping metadata operations during writes. This new feature is well-suited for situations where applications maintain their own index (as is the case with many web and big data apps). We aim to deliver more enhancements around optimizing large-bucket use cases in future releases.

iSCSI in tech preview

Finally, we're introducing an initial set of iSCSI functionality for use with Ceph’s Rados Block Device (RBD) as part of the Red Hat tech preview program. By using a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 host as an iSCSI target, users can map LUNs to kernel RBD images with an Ansible-driven workflow that supports multi-pathing. As we evolve this feature toward general availability, we welcome feedback from users running VMware ESX, RHV, or Microsoft Windows as iSCSI initiators. Customers are encouraged to discuss potential use cases with their account managers.

Lifecycle

The Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 stream is supported until July 2019, and the next minor update is targeted for Spring 2017.