By Daniel Gilfix, Red Hat Storage
You may not have heard a lot about Red Hat Ceph Storage lately, but that doesn’t mean the product hasn’t been active. News in conjunction with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 and 10, technology partners such as Rackspace and Micron, and customer adoption at places like Massachusetts Open Cloud, UKCloud, and CLIMB have reinforced the product's role as a cornerstone of the Red Hat portfolio. But the advances of the product, itself, have been relatively under wraps, with versions 2.2 and 2.1 carefully monitored by existing fans and loyal software-defined storage blog readers. We don't expect the announcement of Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 to shake mountains with seismic impact, but we do expect it to inspire our user community with the doors the product opens today and what might be possible long term.
Source: Sheri Terris, from June 1, 2007, https://www.flickr.com/photos/crestedcrazy/534647428
Greater versatility
Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 takes aim at extending the versatility of object storage so that users can connect more successfully to traditional workloads and link them effectively to modern ones. One way is through our new Network File System (NFS) gateway into the product’s S3-compatible object interface. The gateway facilitates the adoption of Ceph Storage as a target for file-based data without requiring changes in data access protocols or the management of data caching semantics. It means Red Hat Ceph Storage users can access the same data set from both object and file interfaces and gradually transition between them based on business need. It also means they can extend the multi-site capabilities of Red Hat Ceph Storage to enable global clusters and data access with the NFS protocol.
Improved connectivity
Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 is laying the groundwork for improved connectivity with analytics engines. By conducting validation tests for compatibility with the Hadoop S3A plugin, Red Hat is extending financial and operational benefits of a scale-out, software-defined object storage platform to analytics workloads and data-driven applications leveraging tools like Hadoop, Hive, and Spark. With analytics data stored in an S3-compatible object store, developers have access to a broader ecosystem of tools and language bindings, no longer forced to use a bulky HDFS client. By concentrating data sets in a common object store, data duplication and data lineage challenges are simplified. Multiple ephemeral instances of elastic analytics clusters can reference a single source of truth.
Deployment flexibility
A final capability targets the highly coveted customer requirement of running Ceph in a containerized format. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 includes a single container image that delivers the same capabilities as in the traditional package format. With a Red Hat Ansible-based deployment tool, users can perform installations, upgrades, and updates with atomicity for reduced complexity, easier management, and faster deployment. This supports customers in areas like telecommunications seeking standardized orchestration and deployment of infrastructure software in containers with Kubernetes by adding a cloud-native storage service to this orchestration methodology.
A new chapter
These new capabilities demonstrate the new heights Red Hat Ceph Storage aims to scale, supported by a company firmly committed to real-world deployment of the future of storage. By combining massive scalability with multi-protocol access to highly available clusters, Red Hat Ceph Storage is moving object storage up the mountain to help unleash its power for modern workloads. For more information, check out this short video:
Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 is expected to be available later this month.
