IBM Storage Ceph is a software-defined storage platform for enterprises that combines the open source Ceph storage system with a management platform, deployment utilities, and support services. Storage Ceph 8.0 is now generally available.
The Ceph platform provides massively scalable object, block, and file storage from a single solution. IBM Storage Ceph has been part of IBM’s storage portfolio and software-defined storage since January 2023, and runs on industry-standard x86 server hardware. It can be started with small workloads and can scale to petabyte-sized ones.
As well as RADOS (Reliable Autonomous Distributed Object Store) core updates, the main highlights of Storage Ceph 8.0 are NVMe/TCP block storage for VMware enhancements, along with NFS v3, v4.1, and v4.2, enabling file access for non-native Ceph clients.
There is also SMB v2 and SMB v3 Windows file access (Tech Preview), including MS Active Directory and ACLs support.
In addition, there is extended AWS compatibility, a new multi-tenancy feature with identity access management, as well as extended UX functionalities, new cluster configuration options, and security enhancements.
Storage Ceph RADOS core updates include RBD Snapshot improvements, with reduced CPU usage and reduced latency. Additionally, Storage Ceph IBM BlueStore compression offers improved storage efficiency without requiring additional software layers.
Performance improvements realized by tuning and optimization include using the Storage Ceph Crimson backend (Tech Preview). Crimson is a next-generation backend for Storage Ceph that provides a more efficient and performant implementation of Ceph object storage capabilities, said IBM. Crimson takes advantage of modern programming techniques and technologies.
As an option, IBM offers Storage Ready Nodes for IBM Storage Ceph clients. The nodes are servers that have been fully tested and qualified for IBM Storage Ceph implementation and production use cases.
Marcel Hergaarden, product manager for IBM storage infrastructure, has published a blog explaining all the improvements offered by IBM Storage Ceph 8.0.
