Red Hat Ceph Storage Reviews

We use Red Hat Ceph Storage for a Kubernetes backend.

It took me a long time to get the storage drivers for the communication with Kubernetes up and running. The documentation could improve it is lacking information. I'm not sure if this is a Ceph problem or if Ceph should address this, but it was something I ran into. Additionally, there is a performance issue I am having that I am looking into, but overall I am satisfied with the performance.

I have been using Red Hat Ceph Storage for three years.

Red Hat Ceph Storage is a reliable solution, it works well.

The scalability is one of the most useful aspects of Red Hat Ceph Storage.

I did not contact the support.

The Red Hat Ceph Storage initial setup is complicated.

We did the implementation ourselves with a couple of people.

The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable.

Red Hat Ceph Storage is working exactly as it should be. It's running in the background, and it's working, and it doesn't bother me.

I would recommend Red Hat Ceph Storage. it is a good system. It is important they have knowledge or if they can find somebody to support them. It's not a good solution if you don't know what you're doing.

I rate Red Hat Ceph Storage an eight out of ten.

The solution is used for block storage for an OpenStack environment. I'm the Information Team Lead.

The product allows our OpenStack environment to move away from the classic network type of backend storage. It enables increased resilience using commodity hardware pricing and that is a major benefit. In comparison to a solution such as FlashBlade, for the capacity and performance you get, Ceph Storage is half the price.

I like the distributed and self-healing nature of the product. 

Ceph Storage lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication. That is a huge loss in terms of performance. It's also very intensive on the backend network and takes a lot of resources from the network. I'd like to see a higher performing CephFS, which is the file system part of Ceph.

The company has been using this solution for the past five years, I've been using it for 12 months. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable, but if you've chosen erasure coding, migrating to a different configuration is difficult and requires some knowledge.

We haven't dealt with technical support, any issues are dealt with in-house. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward. The documentation describes it perfectly, and it's quite clear as long as you know what you want. We deployed in-house. The planning took a couple of days, making our choices, etc. and the effective deployment took half a day.

Red Hat Ceph is an open-source product so it's self-supported in our environment.

My suggestion is to try before you buy so you know it's the right solution. It's not one-size-fits-all. The product has plenty of potential for growth, but the parts where we would like to see growth are not necessarily where the vendor is focusing its attention.

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

I am involved with Ceph and OpenStack as an integrator. I set it up or consult with clients for private cloud deployments. Ceph is my storage of choice for OpenStack and general object-storage needs.

Ceph has simplified my storage integration. I no longer need two or three storage systems, as Ceph can support all my storage needs. I no longer need OpenStack Swift for REST object storage access, I no longer need NFS or GlusterFS for filesystem sharing, and most importantly, I no longer need LVM or DRBD for my virtual machines in OpenStack.

The ability to present Rest API, POSIX filesystem, and block devices from the same distributed object storage back-system (RADOS) is of major value to me.

Ceph lacks a little bit only in performance. It needs to scale a lot and needs very fast and well-orchestrated/configured hardware for best performance. This not a downside though, it is a challenge. Ceph only improves the given hardware.

I have encountered issues with stability when replication factor was not 3, which is the default and recommended value. Go below 3 and problems will arise.

Ceph has no issues with scalability but needs proper planning regarding the hardware.

Technical support from the mailing lists is very good but you always need to get your hands dirty. However, if you pay for a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage, support is a big advantage.

I have used many solutions but not as extensively as Ceph. I switched to Ceph because of its architecture and because it is a one-stop shop when it comes to storage.

Ceph is complex, as with all distributed systems. It has a long learning curve but it pays for itself after that.

If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty.

I have been using Ceph since 2015, in both SOHO and bigger private cloud installations.

Ceph, as a distributed storage solution, is amazing and I can only rate it a 10 out of 10. However, being distributed and complex, Ceph needs engineers with a good understanding of its internals and Linux, for it to shine.

Overall, it is a great product.

We’re using Ceph storage to provide allocation space to instances (VMs) in an OpenStack environment.

The product spawned a new vision of storage deployment, as well as a strong interest in reusing equipment and increasing ROI. We have some legacy servers that can be associated with this structure. With Ceph, we can rearrange these machines and reuse our investment.

• We can reuse servers of any type and include them in the deploy of the solution.
• radosgw and librados provide a simple integration with clone, snapshots, and other functions that aid in data integrity.

In the deployment step, we need to create some config files to add Ceph functions in OpenStack modules (Nova, Cinder, Glance). It would be useful to have a tool that validates the format of the data in those files, before generating a deploy with failures.

No current issues. Almost all our difficulties were related to implementation. After that, everything ran well.

Most times that I have implemented Ceph, I have used some type of deployment tool, like RDO (Red Hat Director). With these tools, I can make the environment scale in or out without issues. An attention point is looking for a journal and disk separation on the YAML file.

It is possible that you only have support if you partner with a vendor like Red Hat. However, you can find many articles in forums or GitHub.

We had no previous solution. My first contact with ephemeral storage is through Ceph.

My first deployment was complex, connecting Ceph with all OpenStack modules, but that was  before I was testing Ceph and doing installations manually and with hard coding.

It is not a complex implementation, but you need to look into all the structure requirements and OSDS division.

Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription as a bundle.

No.

I rate it at nine out of 10. It is a product which is constantly undergoing improvements.

The most valuable feature is the stability of the product. 

The storage capacity of the solution can be improved. 

I have been using this solution for ten years. 

I would rate stability a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution in our internal app. Around fifty people in our organization use this solution. I would rate the scalability a six out of ten. 

We solve a problem by searching on Google instead of contacting technical support. We never communicated with the support team. 

Previously we used a product that we developed in-house.

The initial setup was easy. It takes less than an hour to install this product. 

To perform maintenance, security experts and developers are needed. About three to four people are required for maintenance.

I would recommend others to use this product if they get the chance. I would rate the product a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution as the RBD and FS system for block storage.

The best features are performance, open measure for hardware options, and scalability.

An area for improvement would be that it's pretty difficult to manage synchronous replication over multiple regions. I also don't like the containerization method for Cephadm in the recent deployment. In the next release, I'd like to see reports for security and performance.

I've been working with this solution for approximately five years.

This is a very stable system, and I see very linear performance growth over expansions, so I'm more or less happy with it.

The scalability is good.

The initial setup was pretty good, I deployed it completely in one day.

The price of this product isn't high.

Companies that can afford completely flash-based pipe servers should go for Ceph. It's a very performance-intensive, brilliant storage system, and I always recommend it to customers based on its benefits, performance, and scalability. I would rate it as eight out of ten.

We are using it in a Proxmox Cluster.

Without any extra costs, I was able to provide a redundant environment. After I built the first cluster, other departments notice the performance and redundancy, then they started building their own clusters. I helped them to design and build their cluster. Now, we have four Ceph Clusters running, three in production and one in the test environment.

We are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage.

This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing. 

After adding new OSD, e-balancing is an huge issue if not properly configured, as it can cause huge performance issues.

We used Ceph as back-end storage for our internal cloud, based on OpenStack.

Our environment was a small open-source OpenStack cloud, on 10 Dell servers, each with two 1TB disks. We installed Ceph on each server to handle those disks and integrated OpenStack Cinder with Ceph to be used as cloud storage instances.

Scale out storage and storage redundancy.

Data redundancy, since it can survive failures (disks/servers). We didn’t lose our data or have a service interruption during server/disk failures.

Rebalancing and recovery are a bit slow.

I used it for about two years. We had no service interruption and no loss of data.

I have used (or know) the following distributed/shared file systems: Gluster, NFS, GFS2, and Ceph. For me, Ceph is one of the best.