Introduction
Overview of Archival and Tiered Storage Challenges
As data growth accelerates, organizations increasingly rely on archival and tiered storage to efficiently manage capacity, cost, performance, and compliance. These storage models balance frequently accessed “hot” data with rarely used “cold” data by placing them on appropriate storage tiers.
However, implementing and managing archiving and tiering pose several challenges. Storage systems must integrate different technologies (flash, disk, and tape) so that data is stored on the most suitable medium, based on its importance and usage. Tiering and archiving must be driven automatically by policies, and storage solutions must support standardized protocols.
IBM Storage Ceph + PoINT Archival Gateway addresses these challenges. PoINT Archival Gateway (PAG) integrates tape storage seamlessly into any Ceph cluster via a standard S3 interface, enabling a consistent, end‑to‑end archival and tiering workflow.
Introducing PoINT Archival Gateway
Overview
PoINT Archival Gateway (PAG) is a high‑performance, scalable S3 object storage solution for tape. It connects any S3‑capable storage—such as IBM Storage Ceph— with tape libraries as the target tier.
PAG provides user, data, and storage management alongside access control, logging, and monitoring. It writes directly to tape media (no costly disk cache). Optionally, an additional disk or flash tier can be integrated for use cases that require rapid data access. Internal tiering, driven by standard S3 lifecycle policies, optimizes data placement automatically.
Key Features
- High data throughput via massive parallelism
- High availability using redundant server nodes
- Linear scalability with built‑in load balancing
- Direct tape read/write (no disk cache)
- S3 & S3 Glacier compatibility, full lifecycle‑policy support
- Supports LTO and 3592 tape drives
- Erasure Coding across tape media
- Object versioning
- Data protection via object locking, authentication, encryption
Introducing IBM Storage Ceph Object Storage
Overview
IBM Storage Ceph is an enterprise‑grade, software‑defined storage platform built for data‑intensive workloads and hybrid‑cloud deployment. It unifies object, block, and file services on commodity x86 hardware, backed by enterprise support, certified updates, and SLAs for production environments.
Key Features
- Enterprise‑ready, low‑latency S3 endpoint with global deployments
- Rich S3 & IAM fidelity with a continually expanding API set
- Easy deployment & multi‑site replication in minutes (UI or CLI)
- Robust security/compliance: encryption, STS, Object Lock, public‑access block, MFA‑delete, fine‑grained IAM policies
- Limitless horizontal scaling to PB/EB levels without downtime
IBM Storage Ceph Object Tiering Capabilities
Ceph’s object‑tiering engine automatically migrates data between high‑speed and archival storage classes—on‑prem or cloud—based on lifecycle policies. This delivers the right blend of performance, durability, and cost.
Benefits of Integrating PAG with IBM Storage Ceph
By exposing tape as a native S3 storage class, PAG enables a true multi‑tier Ceph architecture. Ceph’s policy‑based archival pushes cold data to tape for low‑cost retention while keeping hot data on flash/disk.
- CapEx & OpEx savings by tiering cold data to tape
- Minimal power draw via energy‑efficient tape
- No extra disk tier needed—direct tape write
- Meets long‑term retention & compliance mandates
- Air‑gapped protection against cyber‑threats
- Optimized placement for performance vs. cost
- Vendor‑agnostic tape support
PAG & Ceph Integration Workflow
- Cloud‑tier setup: Admin defines a tape storage class in Ceph.
- Object ingest: Users/applications write to a hot bucket.
- Lifecycle trigger: Policy moves objects (e.g., after 365 days) to tape.
- Automatic tape archival: Ceph transitions objects to PAG.
- Long‑term storage & retrieval: Objects remain addressable via Ceph S3 or PAG.
IBM Storage Ceph 8.0 (Tech Preview) introduces policy‑based retrieval, allowing direct restores from S3 tape endpoints (PAG) back into Ceph:
- Temporary restores: Data is auto‑deleted after expiry.
- Permanent restores: Objects fully reintegrate into Ceph.
Retrieval paths: S3 RestoreObject API or transparent read‑through GET.
Use Cases for Policy‑Based Archive & Retrieval
- Regulatory compliance — low‑cost tape retention
- Media & content — archive footage; partial restore
- Scientific/HPC — tier large data sets automatically
- Cybersecurity — air‑gapped, immutable backups
- Hybrid/multi‑cloud — same S3 API across tiers
Increasing Data Security & Performance with Erasure Coding on Tape
PAG supports EC rates 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 2/3, 2/4, 3/4 across multiple media (Protected Volume Arrays). Benefits:
- Higher redundancy—data survives media failure
- Parallel writes boost aggregate throughput
- Copies can span multiple libraries/vendors
Conclusion
Deploying PoINT Archival Gateway with IBM Storage Ceph provides end-to-end, policy-driven tape tiering. The joint solution slashes storage costs, strengthens data protection & compliance, and provides on‑prem tape capacity via a seamless S3 interface.