Red Hat releases Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2

Well, that didn’t take long! In late April, Red Hat acquired Inktank for Ceph, its open source, software-defined storage stack for clouds. And in July, Red Hat announced the release of  Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2.

Ceph has come a long way in its 10-year history.

This new release, according to Red Hat, comes “with new features to help customers store and manage an entire spectrum of data — from ‘hot’ mission-critical data to ‘cold’ archival data.” This acquisition, and its quick release, is all part of Red Hat’s plans to become a cloud power.

In a ZDNet interview, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said of his company’s acquisition of OpenStack integrator eNovance and Ceph that “Red Hat “is looking to create an open source stack for infrastructure and platform as a service.” Red Hat made no secret that this stack will be based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and OpenStack.

In particular, Whitehurst believes that Ceph is the way for businesses to deploy scaled-out storage. He sees OpenStack and Ceph moving software-defined storage to open source once and for all.

In a statement, Neil Levine, Red Hat’s director of Storage and Big Data product management, added: “Enterprises are under pressure to store expanding amounts of data with limited IT budgets. As part of our commitment to redefining the economics of software-defined storage, the new archiving and tiering functionality in Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 enables users to define pools for storing data densely, and therefore more cost-effectively, as well as pools that serve data very quickly. And, because these pools all work together, customers can now create the blend of price and performance that’s right for them for both cold and hot data storage.”

So how will the new Ceph do this? With the following new features:

Erasure coding: This makes Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 suitable for archive and cold storage use cases by reducing the cost per gig. Specifically, Red Hat claims that this can reduce raw storage capacity requirements by up to 50 percent.

Cache tiering: This enables “hot” data to be moved onto high-performance media when it becomes active and “cold” data to be moved onto low-performance media when it is no longer active. The net result of erasure coding and cache tiering will be to enable companies to mix together the right blend of price and performance for their specific needs.

Calamari v1.2: This update of the recently open sourced Ceph management platform enables an administrator to manage the core functionality of the reliable autonomic distributed object store (RADOS) storage cluster, including the ability to manage individual storage devices and pool policies. Calamari is an on-premise application with management tools and performance data that simplifies operational management and enables administrators to adapt to changes in their Ceph clusters.

This updated Ceph comes with comprehensive integration with RHEL OpenStack Platform 4 and 5. At the same time, however, Ceph Enterprise 1.2 is also supported on RHEL 6.5 and 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04.

Source : zdnet.com