Red Hat has today announced Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3. This release, based on Ceph 10.2 (Jewel), introduces a new Network File System (NFS) interface, offers new compatibility with the Hadoop S3A filesystem client, and adds support for deployment in containerized environments. These improvements expand the product’s versatility as an object storage platform, offering the ability to support big data analytics and serve as a common platform for file-based workloads.
This release marks the latest milestone in Red Hat’s mission to provide highly elastic, flexible storage that can be optimized to suit a variety of workloads across any size of enterprise deployment. Red Hat Ceph Storage is an open, software-defined, unified storage platform. It decouples software from hardware to run cost-effectively on industry-standard servers and disks, scales flexibly and massively to support multiple petabyte deployments, and provides web-scale object storage for modern use cases.
Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Storage, Red Hat, said, “In today’s environment of exploding data growth, customers need support for existing and modern workloads as they update their infrastructure with software-defined technologies to be more nimble and cost-efficient. Red Hat aims to assist customers with IT modernization, and object storage advancements in Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 coupled with Red Hat Consulting and Global Support can be instrumental to their transition and ultimate success.”
This latest version of Red Hat Ceph Storage adds a lightweight NFS interface to the Ceph Object Gateway. As a result, users and their applications will be able to access the same data set from both S3 object and NFS file interfaces, gradually transitioning between them based on business needs. The NFS interface uses the Red Hat Ceph Storage multi-site capabilities to enable global clusters and data access with the NFS protocol. As a result, file storage customers can take advantage of the scale, flexibility, and cost efficiencies of object storage while modernizing their storage foundation over time.
Compatibility with the Hadoop S3A filesystem client enables the use of big data analytics applications like Apache Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, and Spark with the Red Hat Ceph Storage object store. This allows customers to take advantage of native object storage features like lifecycle and metadata management, reduce costs with erasure coding, and scale compute and storage independently.
Additionally, customers will have access to an alternative vehicle for deploying Red Hat Ceph Storage in containerized environments. A single container image of the product will be available on the Red Hat Container Registry, delivering the same capabilities as in the traditional package format. Using a containerized format with Ansible by Red Hat, Ceph Storage users can perform installations, upgrades, and updates atomically, resulting in reduced complexity, easier management, and faster deployment of software-defined storage.
Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 and its containerized image are expected to be generally available later this month via the Red Hat Customer Portal and on the Red Hat Container Registry, respectively. Thomas Connor, Ph.D., senior lecturer, Cardiff University and co-investigator, CLIMB, said, “We are really pleased to see the release of Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3. We have already benefited from many of the capabilities of Red Hat Ceph to support our community of researchers working on genomics research of global importance. The latest release really expands the versatility of the product’s object store – something that will further empower our users to extract maximum value from their data, through access to traditional workloads.”
