Red Hat Ceph Storage Reviews

My main use case for Red Hat Ceph Storage is primarily for backend storage of OpenStack deployments. This is the most common case, along with archive storage. Another case is large size file system clusters for our tables.

Regarding open source, I primarily use Red Hat Ceph Storage as a safe block device for OpenStack storage. In a few cases, I use it as file system backbones and for 500 TB to 1 PB sized archival storage. These are the most common client cases. For my OpenStack deployments, I always prefer to deploy Red Hat Ceph Storage, even in the back of OpenShift as well.

In terms of features, I found the most valuable functions of Red Hat Ceph Storage to be limited because I didn't work with the OEM product; I worked with the open source version of it.

When it comes to the capabilities of Red Hat Ceph Storage such as object, block, and file storage, I am not fully satisfied. For the synchronous nature of Ceph, I naturally avoid its object storage scenarios and prefer OpenStack Swift for this purpose. This is a personal choice, not based on benchmarking. I tested both and found flexibility with Swift. But Red Hat Ceph Storage is also fine, without issues. I generally prefer Swift because I want to separate my backup storage from the primary storage. For OpenShift or other Kubernetes cases, Red Hat Ceph Storage is fine, and Radosgw is fine, without issues.

From my experience, the main benefit Red Hat Ceph Storage can provide to users is its performance and availability along with fault tolerance.

A typical use case for Red Hat Ceph Storage is for reliability compared to others.

We do not use just Red Hat storage; our customers use Red Hat because of security, reliability, and performance. Stratus allows more reliability than all the other types of computers available.

Compared to Red Hat Ceph Storage, it offers very high reliability since even if the CPUs, RAM, or some other hardware failure occurs, the system can still handle that, which is uncommon with other systems.

For example, other systems use software-based redundancy. When you add Stratus with Red Hat, Stratus is another company that has equipment capable of handling hardware failures while the computer is running.

Even if one of the CPUs stops, the processing does not stop; thus, the reliability of Red Hat plus Stratus is very high, the highest of all.

If you look at Stratus as a company, it provides solutions with Red Hat to give the highest reliability of all systems, no other system is more reliable than that because it can also handle hardware failures without stopping work during issues.

We have a customer using NFS from NetApp, although it's not meeting our requirements. I also have a few customers running Ceph, however, no one is currently using Pure Storage software.

I really like that Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used as a total solution without any storage area network components. You can use bare metal with disks as a basis. It is cloud-native and scalable, offering a robust API and cloud-native features like block storage, shared file systems, and object storage.

We have integrated traditional storage solutions such as Pure, Dell, and PowerMax with Ceph Storage. We operate sixty hosts in production, utilizing automation and infrastructure as code solutions.

Ceph Storage allows us to add value related to cost and offers a unique experience compared to traditional storage. We appreciate the scalability of the open-source solution, allowing us to address our growing data needs without encountering major issues. Having used it as a pilot system in Brazil, we gained significant knowledge and the ability to manage our infrastructure as code.

We provide cloud services called 'made to order', which are public cloud services done by CDAC Chennai. We work for end users and offer Ceph storage for critical applications. For other normal users, we provide different storage.

The replication feature is crucial. Even if we provide a portion of storage, in cases of failures, having three replicas makes it easy to recover. The scalability feature is used by all users and is critical for our operations.

We use the product for archive storage, video surveillance systems, and media storage.

Red Hat Ceph Storage is difficult to maintain. We use CLI tools for maintenance, and the concept seems challenging. Additionally, it is difficult to expand the product due to balancing errors. It takes some time to re-balance the storage in case of server failure. They could improve the speed of the process.

Our primary use case is for integration with OpenStack for block and object storage.

We use both Red Hat Ceph and Azure storage, for all staging and non-production.

We worked with Red Hat Ceph Storage, but mainly we recommended it to special customers with special use cases. For example, when customers purchase the Red Hat OpenShift platform, one of the licensing models is to work with Red Hat Ceph Storage as a storage for the container platform, so this is when we also worked with the solution for our customers. The main use case for Red Hat Ceph Storage was as a container platform for Red Hat OpenShift.

What I found most valuable from Red Hat Ceph Storage is integration because if you are talking about a solution that consists purely of Red Hat products, this is where integration benefits come in. In particular, Red Hat Ceph Storage becomes a single solution for managing the entire environment in terms of the container or the infrastructure, or the worker nodes because it all comes from a single plug.