Blog: OpenStack & Ceph—Storage that is Function-rich, Flexible, and Free

OpenStack is a viable solution for many enterprise data centers. OpenStack is a free, open-source software platform that enables organizations to construct and manage public and private clouds. Its components manage processing, networking, and storage on hardware resources across the data center. Many of the biggest IT firms as well as thousands of OpenStack community members support the software. Among its many users are Intel, Comcast, eBay, PayPal, and NASA, which helped to develop the platform. As such, many view OpenStack as the future of cloud computing.

OpenStack offers flexible storage options, particularly when coupled with Ceph which it supports. Ceph is a free software storage platform that stores data on a distributed storage cluster. It’s highly scalable—beyond petabytes to exabytes—avoids a single point of failure, and is self-healing. What’s remarkable about Ceph is what lies at its core. Its Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS) allows you to provide object, block or file system storage on a single cluster. This greatly simplifies management when you require applications that use different storage systems. Moreover, thanks to its functionality and resilience, you can use commodity hardware to build out your storage cluster for further cost-savings.

Excellent examples of such solutions are the JetStor® RDX48, Storage Server (www.acnc.com/p/JetStor_RDX48) and JBODs (JBOD) from AC&NC. The JetStor RDX48 is a 4U 48-bay device that supports both spinning disks and SSDs. Its SSD caching accelerates storage and retrieval and its caching controller automatically identifies and relocates frequently accessed data to the SSDs for the quickest access and transfer speeds possible. Supporting RAID 5, RAID 6, proprietary RAID 7.3, and RAID N+M, the array delivers enough throughput for HPC applications and it never drops a frame even with concurrent HD or 2K–8K digital video streams.

AC&NC offers similarly robust JBODs that range in size up to 4U 80-bay systems, ensuring every storage need can be met economically and easily. The reliability, performance, and scalability of these AC&NC solutions make them ideal complements to OpenStack/Ceph deployments.