Red Hat Ceph Storage Reviews

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. 

We use the solution for cloud storage. 

We have encountered slight integration issues. 

I have been using the product for more than two years. 

Red Hat Ceph Storage is stable. 

The tool is scalable, and we have around 200 users. 

The tool's tech support is fast and consists of knowledgeable resources. 

Red Hat Ceph Storage's installation is simple and takes around four to five days to complete. 

A consultant helped us with the deployment. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

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.

We use it as cloud storage, connected to OpenNebula cloud system for one of our customers. System includes 56 Supermicro nodes that are specially configured to be used as a hyperconverged system. Same nodes used for storage and virtualization.

It opens doors for completely open-source cloud. No monthly charges, no revenue share policy. It just works.

When going open-source, there is actually not much of a choice. Ceph was chosen to maintain exact performance and capacity characteristics for customer cloud.

Ceph is not a mature product at this time. Guides are misleading and incomplete. You will meet all kind of bugs and errors trying to install the system for the first time. It requires very experienced personnel to support and keep the system in working condition, and install all necessary packets.

The system needs some polishing to be stable enough for a production environment.

CEPH is scalable to almost infinity.

We didn’t use Red Hat services, due to bad experience with them in the past. They usually play email ping pong, while you solve the problems yourself.

None. This was a pilot project and it has worked out.

It is complex. Before the system is built, all your technical staff must research as much about CEPH technology as they can.

We tried Scality. It is the perfect solution, but was out of budget.

Think twice.

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. 

• File Services NFS and CIFS (RBD images)
• Object Services S3 and Swift (radosgw)
• I/O into replicated and erasure coded pools (librados)

Replicated and erasure coded pools have allowed for multiple copies to be kept, easy scale-out of additional nodes, and easy replacement of failed hard drives. The solution continues working even when there are errors.

I/O into replicated and erasure coded pools (librados).

It needs a better UI for easier installation and management.

It has provided retention of all customer sites on which it has been installed in the last three years, with no catastrophic failures so far.

Ceph has allowed us to deploy block storage for our users in a reliable, performance, and easy to manage fashion without vendor lock-in.

By being open source, Ceph is not tied to the whim or fortunes of any one vendor. The community of Ceph code contributors and admins is large and active. Ceph’s ability to adapt to varying types of commodity hardware affords us substantial flexibility and future-proofing.

Routing around slow hardware.

Ceph is more stable than many proprietary solutions.

Ceph is a scale-out solution designed to be free of scale limitations common when using proprietary storage solutions. Ceph will continue to scale meeting our needs for years to come.

Red Hat’s technical support is valuable, but with Ceph, one can often do well with community resources.

I have used traditional storage on much smaller scales: ZFS, SVM, VxVM, and NetApp. They do not fit the use case and demands of a growing Cloud infrastructure.

Initial setup is straightforward with automation tools.

Not applicable.

Ceph is de facto for mixed modality of cloud storage.

Pick up a copy of this excellent book: Learning Ceph - Second Edition.

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.