Red Hat adds tiering and data protection features

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the availability of its Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 with new features to help customers store and manage an entire spectrum of data – from “hot” mission-critical data to “cold” archival data. The new functionality, coupled with enhancements to the solution’s Calamari management and monitoring platform, make Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise storage solution a flexible and cost-effective storage platform for enterprises managing data-intensive applications.
In May, 2014, Red Hat acquired Inktank, provider of Ceph and Inktank Ceph Enterprise open source storage solutions. Inktank Ceph Enterprise delivers world class object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack. Combined with Red Hat’s existing GlusterFS-based file storage offering, the addition of Inktank positions Red Hat as one of the leading providers of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage. As part of today’s announcement, Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise supports the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 to provide a truly integrated OpenStack stack that is delivered from and supported by a single vendor.

According to IDC’s report “Worldwide Cold Storage Ecosystem Taxonomy”, published in March 2014, as data continues to grow at an exponential pace, enterprises increasingly recognize the importance of categorizing and storing data based on frequency of access and relevance, or rather, temperature—with newer or “hot” data sets stored with highest priority and performance. The addition of tiering capabilities to Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 enables enterprises to more effectively execute management of all data – from mission-critical to archival – providing an opportunity to radically reduce storage costs.

Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise now enables users to define pools for storing data densely, and therefore more cost-effectively, as well as caching pools that can deliver high-performance. The new erasure encoded storage pools in Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise provide enterprise-scale durability that can lower raw capacity requirements by up to 50 percent[2]. Additionally, new cache tiering pools enable both hot-to-cold and cold-to-hot data management. By combining the power of these new features, customers can create the right blend of price and performance tailored to their specific needs.

Continuing Red Hat’s commitment to customer choice, Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 is supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 and 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04. Key new features and benefits in Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 include:

Erasure Coding, making Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 suitable for archive and cold storage use cases by reducing the cost per gig.

Cache Tiering, enabling “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.

Calamari v1.2, updating the Ceph management platform to support management functions. These updates will enable 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. In May 2014, Red Hat announced that Calamari had been open sourced as part of the upstream Ceph community.

Comprehensive integration with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4 and 5, enabling an integrated OpenStack cloud storage and platform solution that is supported by one vendor.