Cloud Repatriation Done Right – Announcing IBM Storage Ceph 8.0
By Mike Kieran
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Lyrics from a 1970s Eagles hit, or your cloud vendor’s business strategy?
For many IT leaders, the benefits of storing data in the public cloud are being overshadowed by explosive data growth and long-term retention and exfiltration costs. These challenges are compounded by the complexity of managing multiple protocols and storage systems at a time when skilled IT operators are an increasingly scarce and expensive resource.
IBM Storage Ceph is a software-defined storage solution that can help organizations repatriate workloads, eliminate data silos, and deliver a cloud-like experience while retaining the cost benefits and data sovereignty advantage of on-premises IT. Storage Ceph consolidates support for block, file, and object storage protocols and is massively scalable – it’s engineered with no single point of failure and can scale to support petabytes of data and tens of billions of objects.
New capabilities in Storage Ceph 8.0 include:
- Enhanced support for NVMe/TCP block storage in VMware environments: Ability to isolate tenants on namespace level, improved migration capabilities for non-VMware workloads, improved network balancing across all gateways in a group, capacity and performance upgrades.
- Updates to RADOS core: Reduced CPU usage and latency for snapshot intensive workloads, ‘BlueStore’ compression for better storage efficiency without additional layers of software, ‘Crimson’ backend (Tech Preview) for a more efficient and performant implementation of object storage capabilities, enhanced NVMe/TCP access to Ceph (RBD) block storage.
- Updates to file storage: CephFS filesystem access for non-native Ceph clients; create, edit, and delete NFS exports from within the dashboard after configuring the Ceph filesystem; SMB support for CephFS filesystem (Tech-Preview) access as a Microsoft Windows file share.
- Object storage, RADOS Gateway (RGW) updates: retrieve objects from S3 cloud endpoints (AWS/IBM Cloud) using the S3 API or a transparent read-through workflow, ‘RestoreObject’ API allows to retrieve an Object from an external S3 cloud tier object storage class, Ceph RGW read affinity when responding to 'get object' request.
IBM Storage Ceph 8.0 is currently available.
A more detailed technical blog is available on the IBM Storage Community. For more information on Storage Ceph, go to: https://www.ibm.com/products/storage-ceph