Software-defined storage products: 2017 Products of the Year finalists

The #softwaredefinedstorage products selected as finalists in Storage magazine and SearchStorage's 2017 Products of the Year competition reflect the latest trends in #flash, #cloud and #container technologies. The finalists include a mix of new and updated software-defined storage products, and many support performance-boosting nonvolatile memory express ( #NVMe) #flash technology and extended cloud and container storage options. To be eligible in the Products of the Year competition, a software-defined storage product must run on standard servers with no dependencies on the underlying hardware. Finalists in the category include software that pools and centrally manages storage, file systems, object stores and software powering hyper-converged infrastructure. Software-defined storage products that made it through the finalist cut include the following: DataCore Software SANsymphony PSP6 Update The PSP6 upgrade of DataCore Software's SANsymphony storage virtualization product enhanced REST API integration with more than 200 new operation methods. It also lets customers use the Kubernetes PersistentVolume API to orchestrate deployment, operations and scaling of containerized applications. The update optimized the product's parallel I/O capabilities to improve performance. Elastifile Cloud File System The distributed Elastifile Cloud File System (ECFS) can pool server-based flash storage and present it to applications through a global namespace, enabling any server in the cluster to directly access files. ECFS uses a distributed metadata model and enables linear performance scalability. The product supports global deduplication, compression and snapshot shipping, and its CloudConnect feature lets customers tier colder data to cloud-based object storage. PRO+ Content E-Zine Storage startup trends: Vendors to watch in 2018 E-Zine Dell EMC acquisition: The deal of the century a year later 360 Guide IT industry trends: Six major vendors chart new courses Excelero NVMesh 1.1 Excelero's NVMesh software virtualizes NVMe-based storage, pools the capacity of the SSDs and uses Remote Direct Memory Access networking to connect them. Any Linux-based host server running the NVMesh block client can access the virtual block volumes to enable applications to get the latency, throughput and IOPS of local NVMe. Excelero's Remote Direct Drive Access technology disaggregates storage from applications to save server CPU for the applications. Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform 3.0 The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform supports scale-out block, file and object storage on premises and in public clouds, and manages the storage as a single pool. New FlashFabric technology adds tiering capabilities between two different classes of SSDs, whether SAS or SATA, NVMe-based PCI Express (PCIe) or 3D XPoint. Other new features include AES 256-bit software-based encryption for data in use, in flight and at rest, and CloudScale plugins for Red Hat products, Veritas OpenStorage Technology and VMware vSphere. IBM Spectrum Scale 4.2.3 IBM enhanced its Spectrum Scale clustered file system -- based on the company's General Parallel File System -- in areas such as cloud data sharing, NVMe, audit logging and general usability. IBM also beefed up support for iSCSI, Hadoop Distributed File System and OpenStack object storage. Pivot3 Acuity HCI Platform 2.1.1 Pivot3's Acuity hyper-converged infrastructure platform added policy-based management with quality of service to enable customers to provide more resources for high-priority applications. The software update also enables the system to take greater advantage of NVMe-based PCIe flash storage to reduce latency and improve performance. Qumulo File Fabric Qumulo File Fabric (QF2) runs on premises and in the public cloud, and it claims to provide billion-file capacity. QF2 gives customers programmatic access to features and administrative settings through a programmable REST API and includes cloud-based monitoring to proactively detect disk failures. Additional capabilities include real-time analytics down to the file level, snapshots to the directory level and continuous replication. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 Red Hat's commercially supported open source Ceph distribution added a lightweight NFS interface to the Ceph Object Gateway, letting users access the same object storage data via NFS or Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) API. Compatibility with the Hadoop S3A file system client enables big data analytics applications -- such as Apache Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, Presto and Spark -- to read and write data from the Ceph object store. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 also introduced an option to deploy Ceph in containers. Scality Ring7 Scality stood out among the software-defined storage products for steps it took to unite its scale-out file system and object store, and enable users to access the same data from either protocol. Ring7 supports versioning and replication for object and file storage; data encryption; secure write once, read many (WORM) change control; and cross-region replication to Scality Ring and Amazon's S3 cloud object storage for disaster recovery. SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 SUSE's Enterprise Storage 4, the company's commercially supported Ceph distribution, added support for the Ceph file system, or CephFS, to round out its unified block, object and file capabilities. The software update enabled long-distance replication for block storage and multisite object storage replication to improve disaster recovery. SUSE also enhanced cluster orchestration through open source Salt configuration management software, improved the graphical user interface to ease management and expanded hardware choice with support for 64-bit ARM processors. WekaIO Matrix The WekaIO Matrix scale-out parallel file system is designed to pool server-based flash SSDs for high-performance workloads and tier cold data to object storage in public and private clouds. Matrix presents the local flash storage as a single global namespace to host applications, and the software extends the namespace beyond the flash pool to offload colder data to less expensive S3-compliant and OpenStack Swift-compliant object storage. 

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/450432330/Software-defined-storage-products-2017-Products-of-the-Year-finalists

Red Hat Releases Red Hat OpenStack 12

Today at the #OpenStackSummit Sydney 2017, @RedHat Inc. announced the latest version of its massively-scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service ( #IaaS ), Red Hat @OpenStack 12. This new IaaS is based off of OpenStack’s Pike release, and introduces containerized services, improving flexibility while decreasing complexity for faster application development. Red Hat OpenStack 12 also comes with a slew of new enhancements such as an upgraded DCI (distributed continuous integration) and improved security to help maintain data compliance and manage risk.  The latest version of Red Hat OpenStack builds off of the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is designed for private or public cloud infrastructure. This platform is a tested, certified, and fully-supported version of OpenStack that, according to Red Hat, provides the agility to scale and more quickly meet customer demand without compromising availability, performance, or IT security requirements. Also included in Red Hat OpenStack 12 is Red Hat CloudForms and tight integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage. A big change to this version is the introduction of the containerization of OpenStack services. Red Hat has been key in bringing containers to the enterprise as well as to open source projects that can benefit from containers. As containers are becoming more popular and even critical in some cases, users want more ways to leverage them. The new platform enables users to run OpenStack services on Linux containers. Red Hat OpenStack 12 can containerize most OpenStack services while offering a containerized Technology Preview of certain networking and storage services. Red Hat is also using automation to both make its new platform more efficient and more secure. On the efficiency side of things, Red Hat OpenStack 12 is automating its infrastructure enrollment service and its life cycle management for security certificates. On the security side of things, the platform has updated its OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) and Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic) with volume encryption support and disk partitioning enhancements, respectively. The company will also outline security features, implementation, and guidance for meeting baseline security controls with the release of its new Red Hat security guide. The new version also introduces composable networks, meaning users can define the network topology they need with fewer constraints. Red Hat has also removed the upper limit on networks allowing users to create as many as needed, including the popular L3 spine and leaf topology. Red Hat has extended its technology preview of OpenDaylight, a modular open source platform for customizing and automating a software-defined network. With OpenDaylight, customers can increase speed and throughput, while also having more support for Network function virtualization (NFV). And finally, Red Hat has upgraded its popular Distributed Continuous Integration (DCI) to automatically deliver actionable logs to its quality engineering teams, reducing the amount of time it takes to identify, patch, and introduce fixes back into the upstream community.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/11/prweb14883923.htm

Red Hat Positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant of Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Two Years in a Row

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- @RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that @Gartner, Inc. has positioned Red Hat in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the 2017 Magic Quadrant for #DistributedFileSystems and #ObjectStorage for its storage solutions – Red Hat #Ceph Storage and Red Hat #Gluster Storage. Red Hat is the furthest to the right for completeness of vision and the highest in ability to execute of all vendors in the Visionary Quadrant. This is the second year in a row that Red Hat Storage has been placed in the Visionaries quadrant. .@redhatnews named a Visionary in @gartner_inc's #MagicQuadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object #Storage Tweet this Gartner’s Magic Quadrants are based on a rigorous analysis of a vendor’s completeness of vision and ability to execute. Developed to handle modern storage workloads and meet customer requests, Red Hat has made a number of investments in its storage products over the past year. New or updated storage capabilities include: Expanding container-native storage for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across the hybrid cloud. Earlier this month, Red Hat unveiled Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6, which enables end-to-end storage for all core Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform applications and infrastructure. Release of Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 which increases the versatility of Ceph for object storage by broadening protocol support so that users can connect more effectively to and between traditional and modern workloads. Unveiling Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, the industry’s only production-ready offering with an entirely open source infrastructure stack that is developed, sold and supported by a single vendor. Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are both highly agile software-defined storage solutions that are built to handle different types of demanding workloads. Red Hat Ceph Storage is a robust, unified storage platform designed for object storage and cloud infrastructures at petabyte-scale. Red Hat Gluster Storage is a powerful distributed file system that offers flexible storage services across the data center's footprints – bare metal, virtual machines, private clouds, public clouds, and containerized environments. Both offerings can be deployed on industry-standard hardware. They are supported by an active community of open source developers and partners and used by companies around the world.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171023005815/en/Red-Hat-Positioned-Visionaries-Quadrant-Gartner%E2%80%99s-2017

Analyzing SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.0

#SUSEEnterpriseStorage 5.0 was announced at SUSECON in September, and is expected to be released in late October 2017. It's built upon the foundation of the #Ceph #opensourceproject. @SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.0 has scalability upgrades (from terabytes to petabytes) and can use off-the-shelf storage systems. It's a software-defined storage ( #SDS ) solution for enterprises that can support workloads requiring bulk and large data. It's based on enhancements to the Ceph file system, #CephFS, and SUSE claims a performance boost of more than 200 percent over the previous version. Ceph is an open source project focused upon "transforming IT infrastructure" and making it possible to support "vast amounts of data." Ceph is supported by the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS), which provides applications with object, block and file system storage in a single unified storage cluster.

https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2017/10/05/analyzing-suse-enterprise-storage-5.aspx?m=1

How to Put Docker into Production with Persistent Storage

As the adoption of application containers, including #Docker and #Kubernetes, continues to experience explosive growth, the need for effectively providing persistent storage to run stateful applications in production has developers and IT departments looking for answers. Typically, applications and data are kept separate: server-side applications can be horizontally-scaled easily to increase performance, cloned in the case of a failure, or removed if no longer needed. Storage resources are decoupled from the application, and its lifecycle is independent. While many application components can be designed to be stateless, this is almost never true for an entire application. The main example being a database, an application that may not be on the bleeding edge of application delivery, but still may be run in Docker containers. So, Docker for example, needs to have a way to allow applications to store and manage persistent data.  One solution for adding persistent storage of data to an application is leveraging object storage like S3. However, S3 does not support all data types — for example, a typical database is placed on a file system, and doesn’t fit the S3 model. To solve the problem, Docker volumes were introduced. Docker volumes add a data directory into an ephemeral container. Ephemerality means that an application running in a Docker container can be removed or redeployed at any time. In practice, the Docker storage volume is attached to a container upon start up with either the -v option or via Dockerfile's VOLUME instruction. The volume is managed independently from the container, ensuring that the volume isn’t deleted automatically when the container it is attached to goes away. While Docker volumes are a native feature of Docker, native implementations are very limited. The most important thing to know about Docker volumes is that out-of-the-box, Docker only supports local volumes (stored on the file system of the server where a container is deployed). This may be acceptable for development and testing environments, but it’s a show-stopper for production environments. This is because: Storage coupled with the original host will be lost if the server is rebuilt. Management and data protection are hard to implement with local volumes. In a multi-server environment (with Swarm or Kubernetes), the application owner has little control over which server will be chosen to deploy a new container. For many, relying on local storage is not a viable solution. Attaching an NFS share as a mount point for a container can be a solution for Swarm/Kubernetes clusters initially, but when production scaling begins, a flexible, manageable storage solution is required. For Docker users, there are alternatives. A good solution can come in the form of software-defined storage which runs on the same host as the application container and addresses all storage needs required by Docker. For example, you can connect a solution like Virtuozzo Storage with a Docker-certified plug-in, which provides an effective, high performance alternative (to native local volumes) storage backend for Docker volumes. The plug-in approach adds the much-desired flexibility in storage options for Docker users, who can pick a storage solution that is most appropriate for their needs. When leveraging a more complete software-defined storage to solve persistent storage needs, you gain a lot more in terms of how you can re-imagine the way your company manages its storage resources. Below are just some of the higher-level benefits of using software-define storage solution: High performance: faster than CEPH Extremely cost efficient: Works with commodity off-the-shelf hardware Massively scalable: Store petabytes of data. Easy to manage: Stay in control with an easy-to-use web-based management interface. When it comes to persistent storage for app containers, success is based on two key technologies: SSD caching and journaling provide a significant performance increase to the storage cluster with only 1 SSD per 4 HDD, and automated load balancing to keep "hot" data cached by moving it to less utilized disks, or local disks, or SSD disks – all to maximize utilization of all storage resources. After the Docker volume plug-in implementation, all the benefits of software-defined storage can be realized, in addition to getting persistent storage for application containers. Docker Swarm users can get a production-ready solution that combines storage and compute, eliminating the need for dedicated storage hardware. At the same time, storage performance grows linearly with deployment size and its capacity and performance demands, ensuring that storage is never a bottleneck in the container orchestration platform.

https://www.cio.com/article/3222727/infrastructure-storage/how-to-put-docker-into-production-with-persistent-storage.html

Red Hat Ceph, Gluster roadmaps focus on HCI, containers

Roadmaps for #RedHat #Ceph and #Gluster storage reflect an increasing level of focus on #hyperconvergedinfrastructure, #containers and #bigdata in tandem with the usual performance and feature improvements.  Red Hat roadmaps are no secret, because they follow the development work done in the open source Ceph and Gluster communities. But Red Hat ultimately decides when new capabilities are sufficiently tested and ready for general release in its commercially supported products, and the vendor often adds enhancements and packages, as well as performance and sizing guides, to the mix. For instance, Red Hat recently launched an open source software-based hyper-converged infrastructure product that combines Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Virtualization and targets remote offices and branch offices (ROBOs). The long-term roadmap that Gluster product managers recently unveiled indicates plans to expand the scale and enable smaller configurations that start at a single node. The current minimum is a three-node cluster, and the maximum configuration is nine physical servers for the Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure product. "We're looking at scaling up for customers who need to go more than nine," said Sayan Saha, a director of product management for Red Hat's storage business. "And we have found that in ROBO environments, a lot of people want to start at one node. They understand they won't get the redundancy, but they want to start at one because that's all the space they have." Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure users supply their own hardware. But Saha said Red Hat hopes to find a validated appliance partner to bundle the software beginning in early 2018.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/450423256/Red-Hat-Ceph-Gluster-roadmaps-focus-on-HCI-containers

Integrate Ceph object storage in a VMware vSphere environment

It can be challenging to integrate #Ceph in a #VMware environment, but with the right interface, #vSphere administrators can reap the rewards of #objectstorage. The benefits of object storage are numerous: Its modular design makes it highly resilient, and its flat structure makes it easy to use. It's able to scale to petabytes of data -- which makes it a good option for public storage -- and that level of scalability makes it more affordable than traditional block- and file-based storage. Based on these benefits, it's no wonder the open source world has taken an interest in object storage, with Red Hat Ceph leading the pack.

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/Integrate-Ceph-object-storage-in-a-VMware-vSphere-environment

Latest Red Hat Ceph Storage Release Expands Versatility as Object Store

#RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat #Ceph Storage 2.3. This release, based on Ceph 10.2 ( #Jewel ), introduces a new Network File System ( #NFS ) interface, offers new compatibility with the #Hadoop #S3A filesystem client, and adds support for deployment in containerized environments. These improvements expand the product’s versatility as an #objectstorage platform, offering the ability to support big data analytics and serve as a common platform for file-based workloads. This release marks the latest milestone in Red Hat’s mission to provide highly elastic, flexible storage that can be optimized to suit a variety of workloads across any size of enterprise deployment.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170606005523/en/Latest-Red-Hat-Ceph-Storage-Release-Expands

Micron Ceph block storage expands NVMe configurations

#Micron Technology Inc. is adding an all-flash reference architecture for #RedHat #Ceph block storage, the third offering in Micron's Accelerated Solutions portfolio that launched in 2016.

Product SKUs are being finalized for the Micron Accelerated Ceph Storage Solutions package, which will be sold as a four-node storage cluster and three attached 1U mapping nodes.

The recommended architecture includes qualified Supermicro Ultra Server or SuperServer storage servers, Micron 9100 MAX PCI Express-based NVMe SSDs and Red Hat Ceph 2.1 software-defined storage. It is designed as a building block to support scale-out OpenStack cloud infrastructure.

Each Ceph storage node accommodates 10 2.4 TB U.2 SSDs, or 96 TB of raw storage per cluster. Micron recommends nodes be configured with two Intel Xeon E5-2699 V4 processors, eight 32 GB DDR4 registered dual inline memory modules and two Mellanox single-port 50 Gigabit Ethernet networking switches.

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/news/450419118/Micron-Ceph-block-storage-expands-NVMe-configurations

Micron Accelerates All-Flash Storage Speed, Performance and Value with New Flexible Petabyte-Scale Enterprise Data Center Solution

BOSTON, May 10, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- #Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:MU) today announced at the #OpenStack Summit a high-performance, all-flash Ceph storage reference architecture that leverages the exabyte scalability of #RedHat #Ceph Storage, the rack-space efficiency of the #Supermicro 1U Ultra SuperServer and the speed and endurance of Micron 9100 MAX #NVMe flash PCIe solid state drives. This Micron Accelerated Ceph Solution addresses the needs of enterprise storage users who must efficiently deploy software-defined storage ( #SDS ) optimized for I/O intensive workloads. It is a 4-server node storage cluster that hits 1.1M IOPs1 and reaches 21.8 GB/s throughput2, which can support 7,000+ ultra-high-definition data streams simultaneously3. As the newest member of the Micron Accelerated Solutions (MAS) family of all-flash storage solutions, the NVMe reference design carries the Micron SOLID Ready seal. Organizations are increasingly looking for storage that helps simplify and lower the cost of managing exponential data growth. Much of that growth is in large complex datasets as well as in exploding unstructured object data. Today’s agile IT environments are no longer willing to bear the cost and complexity of maintaining and updating separate proprietary storage arrays for object and block data. With virtualization and cloud computing enabling the pooling of compute, storage and networking across an entire data center, users want the agility to deploy applications that easily scale and are cloud ready. Ceph is open source software designed to provide highly scalable object-, block- and file-based storage under a unified system. Surveys taken at past OpenStack Summits have shown that OpenStack users overwhelmingly prefer Ceph as their block device for OpenStack cloud deployments. Red Hat Ceph Storage is based on the open source community version of Ceph Storage (version 10.2.5), the Jewel release stream. With Red Hat Ceph Storage, Micron can offer a unified block and object storage platform capable of scaling to meet the demands of IOPs-intensive as well as throughput-intensive workloads. The all-NVMe 4-node Ceph building block can be used to scale either the Ceph cluster performance or the Ceph cluster capacity (or both), and is designed for scale-out, software-defined data centers that tightly integrate compute and storage to achieve new levels of performance and value for customers Supporting Quotes “Red Hat Ceph Storage is a robust software-defined storage platform that can serve a variety of workloads, but strong performance also depends upon the right hardware,” said Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Storage, Red Hat. “This reference architecture offers a solution to customers who need the scale and programmability of Ceph with the performance of all-flash hardware. We believe that this solution can offer customers an optimal storage solution for OpenStack and other use cases.” “Data center managers seeking a compact, space-efficient 1U rack footprint should be pleased with the performance of this Micron NVMe reference platform on our Supermicro Ultra SuperServer SYS-1028U-TN10RT+, which can support up to 10 NVMe U.2 drives on each platform,” said Michael McNerney, general manager, Marketing and Solutions, at Supermicro. “Our latest SuperServer line delivers unrivaled performance, flexibility, scalability and serviceability that are ideal for demanding enterprise workloads.” “Solid state drives and DRAM represent a large portion of the value of today’s advanced server and storage solutions,” said Eric Endebrock, vice president, Storage Solutions Marketing at Micron Technology.“With the growing industry adoption of software defined storage and the ‘serverfication’ of storage, enterprise customers should no longer have to overprovision but can now fine tune their storage performance for I/O-intensive workloads with building blocks like the all-NVMe Micron Acceleration Solutions optimized for Red Hat Ceph Storage.” Availability Putting choice in the hands of customers, there are several approaches to deploying a Micron Accelerated Solution. For more information on where and how to buy, visit: www.micron.com/accelerated-solutions. SOLID Ready Micron Accelerated Solutions have received the SOLID Ready seal, providing customers with confidence in deploying a solution that has been architected, optimized and tuned from the storage core to the application level. The SOLID Ready seal simplifies and accelerates the transition to an agile infrastructure by providing tested and proven reference architectures for next-generation enterprise and hyperscale applications including software defined storage platforms, virtualized workload infrastructures, OpenStack solutions and big data environments. The SOLID Ready seal is bestowed upon industry leading solutions that have been evaluated and developed by engineering teams from Micron and our partners to deliver SOLID performance. For more information, the core tenets of the SOLID Ready seal, visit: www.micron.com/solid-ready.

http://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/05/10/981763/0/en/Micron-Accelerates-All-Flash-Storage-Speed-Performance-and-Value-with-New-Flexible-Petabyte-Scale-Enterprise-Data-Center-Solution.html

Big Switch Networks Achieves Red Hat OpenShift Prime Designati

#RedHat Summit -- #BigSwitch Networks®, The Next-Generation Data Center Networking Company announced today it has received Red Hat #OpenShift #Container Platform Prime designation. The company will be at Red Hat Summit May 2nd - 4th to demo support for Red Hat solutions including: Red Hat #OpenStack® Platform, Red Hat #Ceph®, Red Hat Enterprise #Linux®, #Ansible by Red Hat and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with its data center switching fabric, Big Cloud Fabric ( #BCF ). To learn more, visit Big Switch at BOOTH #303. Big Switch will also participate at the Red Hat Telco NFV Mini Summit, Sunday, 5/7 (immediately following Red Hat Summit). Gregg Holzrichter, CMO, Big Switch Networks will discuss the findings of ACG Research's study: Creating Agility & Efficiency at Scale: The Economic Advantages of Open Architecture Platforms in NFV Deployments (more details on this study below). Big Cloud Fabric has achieved Prime designation for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. BCF with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform dramatically simplifies container networking by offering unified physical and virtual networking. Application teams are able to leverage BCF to painlessly deploy container-based applications without having to worry about detailed networking configuration.

http://news.sys-con.com/node/4070581

Lenovo DSS-G software-defined storage solution to be more channel-friendly

Today at #Lenovo’ s Accelerate Partner Forum in Orlando, Lenovo is announcing the availability of #IBM’ s #SpectrumScale [DSS-G]  #softwaredefinedstorage solution on Lenovo’s System x3650 M5 server. Lenovo’s first organic High Performance Computing [HPC] storage offering, the Lenovo DSS-G follows up the GPFS Storage Server, but is likely to have a much more significant channel presence. “With this, we are taking standard Lenovo organic storage, and putting the Spectrum Scale software stack on top of it for performance-centric applications,” said Scott Tease, Executive Director of HPC at Lenovo. The solution’s strength lies in its leveraging of the DSS-G’s declustered RAID, where the RAID rebuild activity is spread across many disks to greatly speed up the rebuild. “What makes DSS-G unique is that it doesn’t depend on a hardware RAID controller to manage RAID.” Tease said. “These are expensive and proprietary, and have traditionally been the bottleneck. By doing RAID control in the software, you get much higher performance and scalability. We can now look at RAID arrays of hundreds of drives, rather than 10 drives managed in a single array.” The Lenovo DSS-G is a pre-integrated, easy-to-deploy rack level offering. It features Intel Xeon processors, Lenovo D1224 and D3284 12Gbps SAS storage enclosures and drives, and software and networking components designed to maximize choice, and which includes #RedHat Enterprise #Linux support. “In the future we will provide even more options, and a lower price point going forward,” Tease said. “Customers will have a choice of JBOD, and the SSD they want to put into it, as well as the connectivity, and the solutions will be supported by one part number from beginning to end. With Lenovo Scalable Infrastructure [LeSI], we are leveraging our server and cluster experience to reduce the complexity of deployment in this type of solution.” Tease also said the Lenovo DSS-G is only the first of a series of software-defined solutions using the same exact building blocks. “This is the first solution of an entire family of things in the future,” he said. In May, Lenovo will release a #SUSE Enterprise Storage version, the DSS-C, designed for interaction with Lenovo scale-out #HANA solutions. Later this year, distributed storage architectures for Red Hat #Ceph Storage and Intel Lustre EE will also become available. The Lenovo DSS-G is likely to be a much better channel product than the GPFS Storage Server. “This can start off with a single 2U JBOD, which is perfect for the channel,” Tease said. “Before we had to start with a minimum of four big JBODs, which wasn’t ideal for the channel. Being able to start with these smaller building blocks makes it a far more approachable solution for the channel.” It also means a significantly lower price point – in the neighborhood of $150,000. The result, Tease said, is that about half of these could be sold through partners.

http://www.channelbuzz.ca/2017/04/lenovo-dss-g-software-defined-storage-solution-channel-friendly-21070/

SUSE Enterprise Storage: A Frugal Solution for Large Data

One of the biggest challenges facing IT departments currently is Large Data and the storage capacity it requires. Storing files of this size if often expensive and as IT departments struggle to do more with less budget, low-cost alternatives are now much in demand. This paper looks at how #SUSE #EnterpriseStorage solutions can provide you with cost-effective, enterprise-grade storage for your Large Data files that contains all the built-in efficiencies of #Ceph.

http://www.idgconnect.com/view_abstract/43475/suse-enterprise-storage-a-frugal-solution-large-data

How Rackspace Optimized Red Hat Ceph Storage

Protecting data was dead center of our intention at #Rackspace when we worked with #RedHat to create our Red Hat #Ceph Storage reference architecture. When designing any solution, it is easy to get carried away and only select individual components that are considered best in class. However, that can cause costs to spiral, as would building specific snowflake solutions for every deployment. Being pragmatic and seeking the balance between capacity, performance, operational complexity, support burden, and cost can be tough with competing priorities, but it is critical to building a repeatable and scalable system which is highly optimized and remains affordable. The Rackspace reference architecture for Ceph Storage provides two types of storage nodes — one designed for performance and another for capacity. We deploy a minimum of five of either of those nodes to create a cluster. To gain the greatest density, we like to use servers that support 24 x 2.5” disks. While in terms of performance it could be argued that the node itself becomes a bottleneck, we find this solution provides a great low latency offering, at a reasonable density. Similarly, for our capacity offering, we again use the same chassis, and populate it with a small number of SSDs for performance, and fill the remaining slots with NL-SAS HDDs for high capacity. This provides dense capacity while also providing good throughput, as there are still a large number of spindles available. Typically, we distribute the Ceph monitor daemons either on the management nodes of the cloud, or in larger deployments onto some of the storage nodes themselves. We have found that dedicating physical servers to monitor duties is typically not necessary, except in the largest of clusters.

https://blog.rackspace.com/how-rackspace-optimized-red-hat-ceph-storage

Red Hat Assists Monash University with Deployment of Software-Defined Storage to Support Advanced Research Capabilities

RALEIGH, N.C. — January 30, 2017 — #RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Monash University, one of Australia’s most prestigious research universities, has implemented a massive multi-petabyte deployment on Red Hat #Ceph Storage.

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-assists-monash-university-deployment-software-defined-storage-support-advanced-research-capabilities

CloudByte Names Former StackStorm CEO as Chairman

The #softwaredefinedstorage startup #CloudByte named Evan Powell as its chairman. And the company recently created a new open source project named #OpenEBS. Powell formerly served as CEO of the software storage company #Nexenta. Most recently, he was CEO of #StackStorm, which got purchased by #Brocade in 2016.

CloudByte was founded in 2011 and has garnered $6.1 million in funding from two rounds. The startup delivers software storage systems to service providers and enterprises deploying private clouds. It competes with the likes of #NetApp.

But it’s also riding the new wave in containerized software-defined storage.

Powell says that when he was at Nexenta, the company was involved on the cutting edge of storage at that time, namely, the transition from hardware to software storage. Now, the cutting edge involves containers.

OpenEBS
In addition, CloudByte is the lead vendor of a new open source group called OpenEBS. CloudByte created the Apache licensed storage project in the fall of 2016. The project includes native container integration with #Kubernetes, Docker, and other orchestration projects.

“It’s slingshotting off #Amazon ’s #ElasticBlockStorage (EBS),” says Powell. “The Amazon APIs have become the de facto standard. OpenEBS is compatible with Amazon’s EBS. No other open source group has embraced EBS APIs.”

OpenEBS uses some of the technology developed by CloudByte including the ability to control quality of service (QoS) from containerized storage controllers.

Open Source Software-Defined Storage
The new OpenEBS joins a number of open source projects for software-defined storage.

“The one we’re going to be compared to is Ceph; that’s the one that’s got the most usage,” says Powell. “It was started by a community but backed by a company that #RedHat bought and is now managed largely by Red Hat.”

#Ceph is a broad open source project, doing block, file, and object storage. While OpenEBS focuses on block storage and runs in a container itself. It bills itself as “containerized storage for containers.”

Other software-defined storage projects have been created by EMC and CoreOS.

EMC created a connection technology – libStorage – to provide a standardized protocol for containers to interface with stored data. The vendor open-sourced libStorage on GitHub.

#EMC #libStorage “is fundamentally an alternative to the #Docker volumes,” says Powell. “In short, it is EMC’s way of offering something that might be more broadly controlled – or at least less directly Docker controlled.”

In addition, #CoreOS established an open source container storage project called Torus.

“Personally I wouldn’t bet against the CoreOS team,” says Powell. “However, they have in this case bet on a means of accessing the storage called Network Block Storage as opposed to iSCSI. iSCSI is much more broadly understood and adopted.”

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/cloudbyte-names-former-stackstorm-ceo-chairman/2017/01/

Permabit VDO Delivers Record-setting Performance on Samsung's NVMe Reference Design Platform

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- #Permabit Technology Corporation, the data reduction experts, announced today that its #VirtualDataOptimizer ( #VDO ) software for #Linux has exceeded the 8GB/s performance throughput barrier for inline compression. This was accomplished running on a single #Samsung #NVMe All-Flash Reference Design node. The latest version of VDO's HIOP Compression has been optimized to take advantage of today's multi-core, multi-processor, scale-out architectures to deliver maximum performance in enterprise storage. To demonstrate this level of performance, Permabit combined VDO with #RedHatCephStorage software and 24 480GB Samsung PM953 U.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs (solid state drives) running on the Samsung NVMe Reference Design platform. Samsung Electronics is one of the first companies to offer U.2 Gen 3 X4 NVMe PCIe SSDs. The PM953 that was used in the testing also features nine watts TDP (Total Dissipated Power) and a Z-height of 7mm. The resulting reference architecture delivered single-node performance of over 8 GB/s read and 3.6GB/s write performance under workloads generated by Ceph RADOS bench. These results are more than twice as fast as published compression performance numbers by proprietary single node storage arrays and were achieved without the use of hardware acceleration boards. Today's data center managers are increasingly turning to architectures built around Software-Defined Storage (SDS) to provide highly scalable solutions that control costs. SDS solutions (such as Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage) must be able to handle enterprise workloads such as databases, virtual servers and virtual desktops as well as, or better than, the proprietary systems that they are meant to replace. While data compression greatly reduces storage costs, one challenge up until now, has been finding a compression approach that could run at high-end enterprise speeds, on standard hardware in an open Linux environment. HIOPS compression technology, incorporated into VDO, addresses all of these requirements because it serves as a core service of the OS. Any SDS solution that runs on that OS can then scale out to support petabyte-sized deployments. "Previous systems relied on proprietary hardware acceleration based on ASICs or FPGAs to deliver a similar level of performance. Permabit Labs has demonstrated for the first time that HIOPS compression can be achieved with industry-standard processors and platforms," said Louis Imershein, VP Product for Permabit Technology Corporation. "We're looking forward to also leveraging the full multi-node, scale-out capabilities of the Red Hat Ceph storage platform as we test further in 2017."

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/permabit-vdo-delivers-record-setting-performance-on-samsungs-nvme-reference-design-platform-300382629.html

The 10 Biggest Storage Stories Of 2016

Prior to 2016, storage industry watchers saw the rise of hyper-converged infrastructure, all-flash and hybrid flash storage and software-defined storage, and thought they would some day negatively impact the storage business as it has existed since #EMC sold its first #Symmetrix array to the #IBM mainframe market. It seemed to all come to a head in 2016. New ways of configuring, managing and buying storage have altered the business significantly, bringing upstarts to the forefront and sending stalwarts reeling. EMC, which started the modern storage industry? Sold to #Dell in a blockbuster, industry-transforming deal. The changes in the storage industry we saw in 2016 are only the precursor of what will happen in 2017 and beyond. Here’s a look at the top happenings in 2016. #DellEMC

http://m.crn.com/slide-shows/storage/300083087/the-10-biggest-storage-stories-of-2016.htm

Rackspace Announces Support for Red Hat Ceph Storage 2

SAN ANTONIO, TX--(Marketwired - November 15, 2016) - #Rackspace today announced support for #RedHat #Ceph Storage 2, expanding its Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat porftfolio of services. This new version from Red Hat is based on the 10.2 Jewel community version release of Ceph and addresses key stability requirements for enterprise customers. Data storage growth is both a reality and a burden for today's enterprises. With the move to digital and data intensive workloads, enterprises are storing an increasing amount of data. With Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat support for the Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 release, customers can gain the performance benefits of software defined storage, without taking on the burden of having to deploy, operate, monitor and troubleshoot their OpenStack or OpenStack storage environment. This new release is the most stable version yet of Ceph and provides numerous features and benefits to enterprise users including: Exabyte-level scalability Open APIs Security Reliability and availability Multi-Datacenter Support Performance Cost effectiveness

http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/rackspace-announces-support-for-red-hat-ceph-storage-2-nyse-rax-2175789.htm

SUSE: Question. What do you call second-place in ARM enterprise server linux? Answer: Red Hat

ARM TechCon #SUSE is claiming victory over #RedHat by announcing – and these caveats are all crucial – "the first commercial enterprise #Linux distribution optimized for ARM AArch64 architecture servers." In plainer English, SUSE has developed an enterprise-grade Linux distribution that runs on 64-bit ARM servers (should you happen to ever find one). SUSE claims this software is a world first because it is a finished commercial product, thus beating Red Hat to the punch: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM is still only available as a beta-like development preview. But wait a minute, this new SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for ARM "will be available by the end of the year," according to the official announcement. So, Red Hat, there is still time – you can still win this race. Hare and the tortoise and all that. SUSE's boast is also a little dismissive of Canonical, which announced earlier this month that "Ubuntu OpenStack and Ceph are now commercially available" on 64-bit ARM-powered servers. SUSE doesn't think #Ubuntu #OpenStack and #Ceph count as an "enterprise Linux distribution" nor "optimized for ARM AArch64 architecture servers." Whatever happened to peace and love in the free software world? Germany-based open-source giant SUSE is aiming its new distro at "large-scale storage, high performance computing and networking systems," and the code will work on boxes powered by Cavium chips and presumably other ARM server-grade chipsets (like AMD's and Applied Micro's and Qualcomm's and so on). The distribution will try to bring features found in SUSE's x86, Power and z Systems enterprise products to the world of 64-bit ARMv8. We're told these key features include: Tools to compile, package, and deploy software for ARM AArch64 servers. Software to exploit system-on-chip acceleration features to speed up storage systems – we're thinking on-die deduplication acceleration and things like that. Similarly, software to make the most of networking, encryption and compression engines built into chips as well as functions provided by FPGAs. In the other corner, Red Hat's RHEL Server for ARM entered its development preview in June 2015, and popped up on Qualcomm's server-grade ARMv8-compatible silicon in March this year. This presentation [PDF] at LinuxCon Japan in July gives an overview of where the project is at. There's also the Linaro Enterprise Group, which Red Hat is a member of, that seeks to create a foundation of software for ARM-powered servers, plus the usual Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu and other distros that support 64-bit ARM to varying degrees. Critically, SUSE doesn't believe these rivals can each describe themselves as a "commercial enterprise Linux distribution," which leaves the door open to SUSE to claim a victory today – well, unless it's pipped at the post before the year is out, of course. Meanwhile, "64-bit ARM support for SUSE Enterprise Storage," which was announced in 2015, will be arriving by the end, we're told. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/25/suse_arm_linux_servers/