Accelerate Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform workloads with Red Hat Ceph Storage and Micron all-flash storage

Scalable, resilient, highly performant storage. Today’s businesses need it, particularly for data-intensive workloads like analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). All these workloads can significantly tax their underlying infrastructure, and scalable, high-performance storage lets organizations achieve their goals across multiple workload categories, including:

• Data at rest (e.g., databases, data warehouses, and data lakes), which requires increased scalability, performance, and resilience.

• Data on the move (e.g., automated data pipelines), which needs infrastructure that cuts the time needed to get to the right set of data.

• Data in action (e.g., continuous integration and development [CI/CD], data analytics, and AI/ML), which requires ways to accelerate processes and increase the self-reliance of analysts and developers.

Start with a storage solution

Before a company embraces a storage solution, though, it’s important for that company to understand both the performance potential of that solution, as well as the workload-specific performance characteristics of the chosen infrastructure platform.

Red Hat Ceph Storage is a robust, software-defined storage solution that offers scalability, simplicity, and security features for workloads that include data analytics, media repositories, content streaming, and both OpenStack and OpenShift cloud infrastructures. Unlike many other software-defined storage solutions, Red Hat Ceph Storage supports block, object, and file storage, allowing support for a wide range of workloads and applications.

However, the performance of Red Hat Ceph Storage, like any software-defined storage, can be affected by processors, memory, and networking, as well as by the underlying storage media.

Test performance with storage media

Red Hat and Micron worked closely together to develop and evaluate Red Hat Ceph Storage solutions built with Micron all-flash storage, and Micron recently published reference architectures based on both Micron 9300 MAX NVMe SSDs and Micron 7300 MAX NVMe SSDs. Our testing used storage servers equipped with dual AMD EPYC 7002 series processors. 

Storage servers with Micron 9300 MAX NVMe SSDs

The Micron 9300 MAX NVMe SSD provides high performance with low latencies. It offers capacities up to 12.8TB and 32 NVMe namespaces while consistently providing read and write throughput of up to 3.5 GB/s of sequential data. 

The reference architecture using Micron 9300 Max NVMe SSDs and Red Hat Ceph Storage consumes six rack units, composed of one Ceph monitor node, four Ceph data nodes, and an Ethernet switch. Capacity per rack unit (RU) is maximized with 10 12.8TB NVMe SSDs per 1RU storage node. 

Using this reference architecture as a starting point, administrators can add data nodes, one rack unit and 128TB at a time. Block and object performance using Micron 9300 MAX NVMe SSDs and Red Hat Ceph Storage is detailed in these tables.