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March 10, 2020

Red Hat Ceph 4 Automates Data Management

Staff report

Data-driven workloads like machine learning and analytics along with the growing demands of distributed application development are driving object storage repositories. Hence, vendors are releasing petabyte-scale options for cloud-native development, including a growing list based on open source efforts.

Among the most popular is Ceph, which also offers block storage and a standard network file system. Ceph storage also comes in different flavors. Red Hat released its latest version of its Ceph storage platform this week based on the Nautilus implementation of Ceph.

The IBM unit said Tuesday (March 10) it is targeting version 4 of Ceph storage at the financial services, automotive and telecommunications sectors as more workloads move to the cloud. Red Hat claimed recent testing of its Ceph upgrade revealed a doubling of performance of write-intensive workloads.

Red Hat attributed the performance gain to greater automation of data management along with “self-healing” capabilities for automated storage backup, recovery and provisioning. “As modern data workloads add stress and complexity to storage infrastructure, it’s critical to automate housekeeping tasks to enable greater scale,” the company said.

Among the upgrades are “integrated bucket notifications” intended to support serverless architectures based on the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator. That feature would help enable automated data pipelines, Red Hat said.

Sarangan Rangachari, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s storage unit, stressed object storage scaling and automation features in announcing it latest version of Ceph. “Scalability is imperative to our customers as they seek a competitive advantage with their vast volumes of data,” Rangachari said. “However, the power of scale is lost if performance capabilities can’t match it.

Amazon Web Services’ Simplified Storage Service is the standard platform for accessing data in the cloud or datacenters. Red Hat said Ceph 4 would enable users to deploy petabyte-size object storage on AWS S3.

However, the study shift to hybrid cloud deployments has helped fuel the growth of third-party object stores, including open source options like Red Hat‘s Ceph, Swift from SwiftStack and Minio Object Storage, as well as proprietary options like Scality’s Ring, Cloudian HyperStore, Dell EMC Isilon and Nutanix Objects.

Red Hat said Ceph Storage 4 is available now.

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