Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 arrives

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 beenDevOps-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.