Why Red Hat can take over the cloud sooner than you think Watch Now

Do you need really serious software-defined storage to handle petabytes of data? Then, Red Hat, with the latest edition of Red Hat Ceph Storage (RHCS), has the technology you need.

RHCS is based on the Nautilus version of the Ceph open-source storage project. It's designed to work on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. But, with its ability to handle petabytes of data, you're most likely to use it on data-farms, data-centers, and clouds.

For example, you can use it to deploy petabyte-scale, Amazon Simplified Storage Service (S3)-compatible object storage. Red Hat claims that, in recent internal testing, RHCS 4 "delivered over a two-time performance boost for write-intensive workloads, making it even better-suited to fulfill the performance needs of today's data-intensive applications."

It's also been DevOps-optimized, so you can use RHCS 4 to move from storage-centric to service-centric operational models. To do this, it relies on improved Ansible DevOps integration.

This helps RHCS with self-managing and self-healing. This, in turn, makes automated backup, recovery, and provisioning easier and -- what's perhaps even more important -- more reliable. Red Hat states this will help enterprises looking for business continuity "always-on" service level agreements (SLA).

Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 includes four significant new features. These are:

A simplified installer experience, which enables standard installations that can be performed in less than 10 minutes.

A new management dashboard for a unified, "heads up" view of operations at all times, helping teams to identify and resolve problems more quickly.

A new quality of service (QoS)monitoring feature, which helps verify storage QoS for applications in a multi-tenant, hosted cloud environment.

Integrated bucket notifications to support Kubernetes-native serverless architectures, which enable automated data pipelines.

Its parent open-source parent project, Ceph, is a distributed object store and file system. It's designed from the get-go to provide excellent big data performance, reliability, and scalability. It supports object, block, and file storage.

Amita Potnis, the IDC research director for Infrastructure Systems, likes this new release.

In a statement, Pontis said: "The massive growth of data and emerging workloads are challenges faced by many organizations. Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 can enable businesses to efficiently scale and support ever-growing data and workload requirements while providing simplified installation and management."

RHCS 4 is available today.

Related Stories: