Red Hat Ceph Storage Reviews

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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 use this as an OpenStack storage back-end of Nova/Glance/Cinder.

• High reliability with commodity hardware

• There is no cost for software

I would like to see better performance and stability when Ceph is in recovery.

Latency increases abruptly when conducting recovery. This impacts the upper application.

It is OK to add a node or a disk, but it may impact the latency of read/write of the application which is running.

The level of technical support is acceptable.

The initial setup was straightforward without much effort.

People can try the vanilla Ceph, if they are confident with their technical skills.

We evaluated VMware vSAN.

It is easy to set up.

I use Ceph as OpenStack and Kubernetes storage back-end solution.

It has helped to save money and scale the storage without limits. 

We did not depend on expensive hardware to start using it and can upgrade it if our demand grows.

Its reliability. I have experienced failures and human mistakes. However, Ceph was able to recover automatically the data with a special procedure.

Geo-replication needs improvement. It is a new feature, and not well supported yet. 

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

The community support is very good. I have never used the paid support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We used the tool ceph-deploy, which is simple to use. The manual procedure is time consuming, but well-documented.

No advice, as we never used the paid support.

We evaluated GlusterFS (POCs), but Ceph provides better block device storage.

I would recommend the product.

It's possible that we should have used the solution a long time ago as it appears to cost the business less money to run some of our data systems using it. We're definitely seeing cost savings since we've implemented it.

The configuration of the solution and the user interface are both quite good.

The management features are pretty good, but they still have room for improvement.

The solution needs to offer support for the fiber channel as a protocol.

I've been using the solution for six months.

The solution has been quite stable for us.

I've not tested the scalability of the solution; our company doesn't have too much capacity.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We didn't look at other vendors. We went straight to this solution as we were already using the brand for our operating system as well.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.