Red Hat Ramps Up Ceph Post-Acquisition

This week has been a huge one for new approaches to data storage. From Cloudian announcing a big funding round, to EMC’s acquisition of TwinStrata. The concept of a software layer abstracting physical storage away from users and instead presenting a broad platform of storage that can be consumed programmatically is as disruptive as virtualization was to physical servers.

One of the more active acquirers in the space is Red Hat, the massive open source powerhouse has made a couple of high-profile acquisitions of late – it has hoovered up both Gluster and Inktank, the initiators and champions of the GlusterFS and Ceph storage platforms respectively. There was plenty of murmuring from customers and contributors to the initiatives, when a big company acquires the incubator of an open source project, there is always the concern that they’ll kill the project.

So it’s interesting to see Red Hat today announcing the availability of its Inktank Ceph 1.2 product – an unashamedly enterprise-focused flavor of the Ceph project. The first major announcement after the May 2014 acquisition, it was always going to be one to watch. Red Hat is layering some sophisticated tiering and data protection features into the Ceph product. Red Hat is also enhancing the project’s Calamari management and monitoring platform to better answer the needs of data-intensive application owners.

Ceph is already one of the options for object and block storage for organizations looking to deploy cloud infrastructure, be it public or private. In particular they have seen success with OpenStack early adopters. The combination of Ceph for object and block storage, alongside Gluster for file storage, rounds out Red Hat’s enterprise storage offerings.

In a nod in the direction of more granular approaches to storage, in particular the fact that organizations have “hot” data (ie that requiring instant access) as well as “cold” data (that which is close to archived data in nature), this version of Ceph has tiering capabilities to allow for this granular storage approach to happen more readily. Erasure Coding, is aimed at making Ceph Enterprise suitable for archive and cold storage use cases by reducing the cost per gig while Cache Tiering 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onto high-performance media when it becomes active and “cold” data to be moved onto low-performance media when it is no longer active.

Interesting times in the storage world indeed. This sector, previously seen as decidedly boring, is getting sexier by the day.