The NetApp StorageGRID solution fits in perfectly with what our company was trying to accomplish. Our goal was to free up our expensive storage flash (SSD) capacity for our critical applications to allow for growth and added performance capabilities. I do not believe this solution would be greatly suited for those without a Cloud solution or secondary site/system to tier data.
Large scale data storage: Red Hat Ceph Storage is designed to be highly scalable and can handle large amounts of data. It's well suited for organizations that need to store and manage large amounts of data, such as backups, images, videos, and other types of multimedia content.Cloud-based deployments: Red Hat Ceph Storage can provide object storage services for cloud-based applications such as SaaS and PaaS offerings. It is well suited for organizations that are looking to build their own cloud storage infrastructure or to use it as a storage backend for their cloud-based applications.High-performance computing: Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used to provide storage for high-performance computing (HPC) applications, such as scientific simulations and other types of compute-intensive workloads. It's well suited for organizations that need to store
Highly resilient, almost every time we attempted to destroy the cluster it was able to recover from a failure. It struggled to when the nodes where down to about 30%(3 replicas on 10 nodes)
The cache tiering feature of Ceph is especially nice. We attached solid state disks and assigned them as the cache tier. Our sio benchmarks beat the our Netapp when we benchmarked it years ago (no traffic, clean disks) by a very wide margin.
Ceph effectively allows the admin to control the entire stack from top to bottom instead of being tied to any one storage vendor. The cluster can be decentralized and replicated across data centers if necessary although we didn't try that feature ourselves, it gave us some ideas for a disaster recovery solution. We really liked the idea that since we control the hardware and the software, we have infinite upgradability with off the shelf parts which is exactly what it was built for.
NetApp Support was able to quickly resolve a networking issue during the deployment of the NetApp StorageGRID system, which we, unfortunately, could not figure out on our own. Not only did Support engage quickly, but they also provided guidance on how to properly troubleshoot various issues such as the one we encountered and also provided excellent documentation.
We chose NetApp StorageGRID because we were not looking for a true backup solution but wanted the features to included a DR centric ideology. The IBM Cloud Backup solution was purely backup focused and did not fit the requirements for our needs. NetApp StorageGRID checked all of our boxes in regards to cost, use case, and ease of manageability.
MongoDB offers better search ability compared to Red Hat Ceph Storage but it’s more optimized for large number of object while Red Hat Ceph Storage is preferred if you need to store binary data or large individual objects. To get acceptable search functionality you really need to compile Red Hat Ceph Storage with another database where the search metadata related to Red Hat Ceph Storage objects are stored.
