Simplified IBM Storage Ceph 7.0 Delivers Unified File, Block, and Object Storage At Scale (2024)

IBM Storage Ceph, formerly Red Hat Ceph, has been on a mission to simplify the deployment and management of its software-defined storage (SDS) platform.

What once was hard has become easy. Since IBM announced the integration of Red Hat storage products into IBM Storage, there has been a surge in interest and growth as customers adopt cloud-native architectures. Those customers are realizing the public cloud’s cost, speed, and elasticity benefits. As such, IBM Storage Ceph, formerly Red Hat Ceph, has been on a mission to simplify the deployment and management of its software-defined storage (SDS) platform. The flexibility and scalability also make IBM Storage Ceph the ideal solution for handling generative AI use cases.

Simplified IBM Storage Ceph 7.0 Delivers Unified File, Block, and Object Storage At Scale (1)

IBM Storage Ceph provides an open, scalable, and software-defined multiprotocol storage solution designed to consolidate data anywhere and everywhere. Optimized for large single and multisite deployments, IBM Storage Ceph efficiently scales to support hundreds of petabytes of data and, in published tests, can support tens of billions of objects. This type of scale and inherent resiliency and security are key for supporting data lakehouses and AI/ML open-source frameworks.

Self-healing, Self-managing Platform

The flexibility of IBM Storage Ceph is apparent in management simplicity and enhanced agility in adjusting to growing business needs while scaling compute and capacity as new workloads are introduced. The self-healing, self-managing elements of the platform are designed to deliver unified file, block, and object storage services running on industry-standard hardware. The unified storage provides clients a bridge from legacy applications running on independent file or block storage to a common platform with object storage in a single appliance.

Support for data lakehouse and AI/ML, along with traditional workloads like MySQL and MongoDB on Red Hat OpenShift or Red Hat OpenStack, is a primary reason 768 TiB raw capacity of IBM Storage Ceph is included with watsonx.data, IBM’s open, governed, fit-for-purpose data lakehouse architecture.

A Solution To Address Continued Data Growth

The explosive growth of unstructured data and generative AI, a trend unlikely to abate anytime soon, influence and benefit each other. Gartner’s Top Trends in Enterprise Data Storage 2023 report suggests that “by 2028, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity across their on-premises, edge, and public cloud locations compared to mid-2023.”

The growth of unstructured data like text, images, and videos fuels generative AI, helping it make sense of this data and find valuable insights. This creates a loop: AI improves with more data, and its realistic data generation enhances our understanding of unstructured datasets, leading to more innovation.

The same Gartner report predicts that “by 2028, 70 percent of file and object data will be deployed on consolidated unstructured data storage platform(s), up from 35 percent in early 2023.” As such, organizations will require a storage management solution that speeds up data handling – from ingestion and cleaning to classification and metadata management – and offers cloud-scale capacity management and deployment, all of which are available in a software-defined storage solution. The scale-out qualities of IBM Storage Ceph can seamlessly meet these growing data demands.

To accelerate and scale the impact of data and AI across an organization, IBM believes that companies need to implement a hybrid design. This will ultimately improve business outcomes. IBM Storage Ceph offers on-prem storage with a cloud-like model, addressing problems like the absence of enterprise features in public clouds, data sovereignty, and costs. Its easy-to-integrate architecture works with various platforms, clouds, hypervisors, open-source databases like Apache Iceberg and Parquet, and full stacks like watsonx.ai, watsonx.data. You can add new nodes or devices easily without interrupting service. It is an excellent choice for constructing a data lakehouse using watsonx.data and other AI workloads.

IBM Storage Ceph 7.0 Prepares for NVMe/TCP

IBM has been busy during 2023, introducing essential updates to Ceph, including IBM Storage Ceph 7.0. This next-generation Ceph platform prepares for NVMe/TCP capabilities designed to deliver faster data transfer between storage devices, servers, and cloud platforms while maintaining the low-latency and high-bandwidth characteristics of traditional NVMe.

IBM Storage Ceph is perfect for applications requiring high-speed storage, like databases, analytics, and content delivery. The architecture makes it easy to fit into current network environments, helping customers easily shift to a software-defined model for faster, more agile, and cost-effective operations.

NVMe/TCP lets Ceph enhance traditional block storage with scalable designs. With NVMe/TCP, Ceph can work with platforms like VMware, allowing businesses to mimic cloud setups in their data centers. This move can reduce reliance on costly, inflexible SAN networks and large storage arrays.

Other features in Ceph 7.0 include:

  • SEC and FINRA compliance certification for WORM with object lock, enabling WORM compliance for object storage
  • NFS support for CephFS filesystem access for non-native Ceph clients

For more details on features, visit the IBM Storage community.

No More Hardware Restrictions

IBM Storage Ceph stores data as objects within logical storage pools, allowing a single cluster to have multiple pools, each tuned to different performance or capacity requirements. Customers benefit from easier and faster data access with content and context classifications, storage capacity limited only by the size of the infrastructure, and cost reductions at scale by removing hardware restrictions compared to traditional and legacy storage array architectures.

Simplified IBM Storage Ceph 7.0 Delivers Unified File, Block, and Object Storage At Scale (2)

Ceph deployment has been made easier with IBM Storage Ready Nodes. This means the platform can be deployed as a complete software and hardware solution. Ready Nodes are available in various capacity configurations optimized for IBM Storage Ceph workloads.

Real World Adventure

Ceph.io takes you through some troubleshooting techniques when migrating from HDD to NVMe. Clyso was approached by a fairly hip and cutting-edge company that wanted to transition its HDD-backed Ceph cluster to a 10-petabyte NVMe deployment. Check out all the details from Ceph.io.

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    Simplified IBM Storage Ceph 7.0 Delivers Unified File, Block, and Object Storage At Scale (3)

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    Simplified IBM Storage Ceph 7.0 Delivers Unified File, Block, and Object Storage At Scale (2024)

    FAQs

    Simplified IBM Storage Ceph 7.0 Delivers Unified File, Block, and Object Storage At Scale? ›

    Simplified IBM Storage Ceph 7.0 Delivers Unified File, Block, and Object Storage At Scale. IBM Storage Ceph, formerly Red Hat Ceph, has been on a mission to simplify the deployment and management of its software-defined storage (SDS) platform. What once was hard has become easy.

    Is Ceph block storage or object storage? ›

    Ceph is an open source software-defined storage solution designed to address the block, file and object storage needs of modern enterprises. Its highly scalable architecture sees it being adopted as the new norm for high-growth block storage, object stores, and data lakes.

    What is IBM Ceph storage? ›

    IBM Storage Ceph is a scalable, open, software-defined storage platform that combines an enterprise-hardened version of the Ceph storage system, with a Ceph management platform, deployment utilities, and support services.

    What is IBM block storage? ›

    Block storage, sometimes referred to as block-level storage, is a technology that is used to store data files on storage area networks (SANs) or cloud-based storage environments.

    What are the advantages of Ceph storage? ›

    Pros
    • High performance with low latency and no downtime.
    • Ability to grow with your data, enabling scalability.
    • No limiting licenses.
    • Automatic storage cluster management and regulation, keeping your data safe.
    • Because Ceph is an open-source platform, it encourages innovation through collaboration.
    Mar 21, 2023

    What are the disadvantages of Ceph? ›

    The complexity of Ceph's architecture can be a significant barrier, especially for organizations without the necessary technical expertise. Setting up and managing a Ceph cluster requires a deep understanding of its components and their interactions. Another potential downside is the initial setup and migration cost.

    Which is better object storage or block storage? ›

    Object storage works best for large volumes of unstructured data, while block storage is optimized for smaller amounts of data that are accessed often.

    Why not to use Ceph? ›

    Ceph is extraordinarily complicated to run correctly. The docs aren't great and commercial support is pretty mediocre. It's an amazing piece of software, but takes a great deal of engineering to get right. Most folks won't invest that much engineering into their storage.

    Is Ceph still used? ›

    Within today's open source storage solutions area, Ceph is a very well known software-defined storage solution, widely being used as standalone storage solution, but also within forms of combined solutions alongside with other products and/or solutions.

    What is the difference between S3 and Ceph? ›

    Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer. Red Hat Ceph Storage is a software defined storage option. S3 is the most mature simple storage service on the web.

    What's the difference between file and block storage? ›

    Block storage mainly uses unique identifiers for each block when searching, finding, and retrieving data. Cloud file storage uses metadata to describe the data that a file holds. You can access and change the metadata that's attached to files.

    Why do we need block storage? ›

    Developers prefer block storage for applications that require efficient, fast, and reliable data access. Think of block storage as a more direct pipeline to the data. By contrast, file storage has an extra layer consisting of a file system (NFS, SMB) to process before accessing the data.

    What is an example of block storage? ›

    The most common examples of Block Storage are SAN, iSCSI, and local disks. Block storage is the most commonly used storage type for most applications. It can be either locally or network-attached and are typically formatted with a file system like FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, and EXT4.

    How does Ceph storage work? ›

    Within the Ceph Storage Cluster, the Ceph object storage devices stores the data as objects on storage nodes. A Ceph Storage Cluster can have thousands of storage nodes. Within the storage system itself, Ceph uses distributed object storage, which is a computer data storage architecture that treats data as objects.

    Is Ceph storage free? ›

    Ceph delivers object, block, and file storage in a single, unified system. Ceph is highly reliable, easy to manage, and free. Ceph delivers extraordinary scalability: thousands of clients accessing exabytes of data.

    What is the maximum storage size of Ceph? ›

    CephFS has a configurable maximum file size, and it's 1TB by default. You may wish to set this limit higher if you expect to store large files in CephFS.

    Is S3 object storage or block storage? ›

    Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

    What type of filesystem is Ceph? ›

    The Ceph File System (CephFS) is a file system compatible with POSIX standards that is built on top of Ceph's distributed object store, called RADOS (Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Storage). CephFS provides file access to a Red Hat Ceph Storage cluster, and uses the POSIX semantics wherever possible.

    How does Ceph store data? ›

    The data received by the Ceph Storage Cluster is stored as RADOS objects. Each object is stored on an Object Storage Device (this is also called an “OSD”). Ceph OSDs control read, write, and replication operations on storage drives. The default BlueStore back end stores objects in a monolithic, database-like fashion.

    What are examples of block storage? ›

    Storage layer consists of physical block storage devices like magnetic tape, disk drives, or optical media. Fabric layer bridges SAN servers and SAN storage with devices like SAN switches, protocol bridges, routers, cables, and gateway devices.

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