Red Hat Ceph Storage Reviews

The use case is for our Red Hat customers. We are the distributor for that product and we sell some solutions like OpenShift and OpenStack. If the client needs a storage ecosystem from Red Hat, we offer Ceph Storage.

The product can be integrated with any storage and we can create it like block storage and then ISO storage. We keep our files in storage. They can be anything from video to PDF. The flexibility in the storage is good.

If you use for any other solution like other Kubernetes solutions, it's not very suitable. It's very good if you have a customer that is using a Red Hat deployment like OpenStack or OpenShift. It's not great if you aren't. They need to adjust the product in order to have compatibility with other solutions also.

The installation of the software could be simplified. 

I'm just a new hire in the company, however, we have been exploring Ceph Storage for two years.

The solution is pretty stable. I'd rate the reliability seven out of ten. 

Our user actually uses it as a standalone cluster. There is no scaling happening. 

Right now, I'd rate the overall scalability at a four out of ten. 

We have about ten companies using the solution right now. 

Technical support is very responsive. We have the customer portal and are communicating with them through that. We can create a ticket through the customer portal or via phone. They're very communicative and also very helpful in terms of sorting our problems.

Positive

We deal with various Red Hat products. 

The installation is sometimes complex. Sometimes we have problems during the installation of the storage system. We'd like the process to be simplified. 

How long it takes to deploy the solution depends on the infrastructure. If you use maybe only one PB, it might take eight hours, in our experience. It could take a week if we need to config and install from the TMI.

During implementation, we set the topology first. We recommend and set how much storage is needed to convert into Ceph Storage. Then we can just run the script and then run the configuration on Linux and start integrating it with other CMs. We can create it as storage or as NFS.

We tend to use two to three people for the deployment part of the setup. They are engineers or system admins. An IT manager isn't involved right away. They come in later if there are issues or the company needs troubleshooting. 

We handle quarterly maintenance tasks. We'll check everything and handle any maintenance needed on the system for the client. 

We can install the product ourselves. We have something like a remote center where we can test the product in an environment, and after we test it we can install it into our customer's environment.

I'm not sure of the exact cost. It's based on the amount of storage needed. As an open-source solution, it's possible users may just need to pay for support. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It might be around version four. 

We're a reseller.

I'd recommend the solution to other users if they have a Red Hat ecosystem.

I'd rate the solution a five out of ten since it can be complex to install. 

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 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.

We use the product as a backend storage cluster, especially for Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters.

The high availability of the solution is important to us. It is a quick tool. The cluster structure is important. We can add and remove nodes.

Some documentation is very hard to find. The documentation must be quickly available.

I have been using the solution for about five years.

The tool has the best stability. It is reliable. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The tool is scalable. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. We install the tool for our customers’ environments. We have ten customers. We have six engineers in our technical team.

The setup is complex. We follow the documentation to deploy the tool. The deployment takes about a day.

The deployment can be done in-house.

When we face a problem, we search the documents to fix the issue. The solution does not crash. It is reliable and scalable. Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

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 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.

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.

• 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.