VSAN (Virtual SAN) and Ceph are both software-defined storage solutions, but they have some key differences in terms of their architecture and capabilities.VSAN is a software-defined storage solution that is built into the VMware vSphere hypervisor. It allows organizations to …
Our data centers use simpler hardware & Red Hat Ceph Storage is simpler to use for moderate-sized data centers with simple hardware. Also, glusterFS is more suitable for a large amount of data (Zetabytes) with large file sizes which is not our requirement. It is easy to make …
Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are both software defined storage solutions designed to decouple storage from physical hardware. Red Hat Ceph Storage provides storage that scales quickly and supports short term storage needs. In contrast, Red Hat Gluster Storage handles big data needs well and can support petabytes of data. Both software options are used by businesses of all sizes, and it is possible for a business to make use of both storage solutions.
Features
Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage both help users address storage needs in a software defined way, but they take different approaches to storage problems and have some standout features that set them apart from each other.
Red Hat Ceph Storage is designed around storing data as objects that can be easily shared across a network. Any device on the network can easily access any data stored on the Red Hat Ceph Storage cluster. Users will also have an easy time distributing and receiving data using Red Hat Ceph Storage due to it’s easy to use dashboards. This approach to storage makes it easy for businesses to store data that needs to be accessed frequently from multiple devices.
Red Hat Gluster Storage is built to store data in large chunks called blocks, which can scale very quickly as businesses generate more data. Blocks stored using Red Hat Gluster Storage can be transferred as a unit, so relevant data can be packaged together without risk of losing individual pieces. The block approach to storage makes Red Hat Gluster Storage ideal for businesses that need to store large amounts of data.
Limitations
Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage provide essential storage features, but they also have some limitations that are important to consider.
Red Hat Ceph Storage allows for quick storage and sharing, but is more prone to data loss than a block solution like Red Hat Gluster Storage. Additionally, data cannot be grouped together as easily as it can with Red Hat Gluster Storage, so it can be a little more difficult to share packages of data using Red Hat Ceph Storage.
Red Hat Gluster Storage is a more resource intensive program compared to Red Hat Ceph Storage, and doesn’t make it as simple to quickly share data objects. Because Red Hat Gluster Storage doesn’t provide a simple cluster that multiple devices can receive data from, it isn’t ideal for data that needs to be accessed by multiple users in a short period of time. For businesses looking to store data that may scale up and down in size, ceph storage may be preferred while Red Hat Gluster Storage performs well as data storage needs become consistently large.
Pricing
Both Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are open source options that can be implemented at no cost. For businesses looking for assistance, support is also through Red Hat partners and third party vendors. In either case, pricing depends on the vendor chosen and the needs of the business.
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
GFS is well suited for DEVOPS type environments where organizations prefer to invest in servers and DAS (direct attached storage) versus purchasing storage solutions/appliances. GFS allows organizations to scale their storage capacity at a fraction of the price using DAS HDDs versus committing to purchase licenses and hardware from a dedicated storage manufacturer (e.g. NetApp, Dell/EMC, HP, etc.).
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.
Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacity
Performs; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performance
Integrates well with RHEL/CentOS 7; if your organization is using RHEL 7, Gluster (GFS) integrates extremely well with that baseline, especially since it's come under the Red Hat portfolio of tools.
Documentation; using readthedocs demonstrates that the Gluster project isn't always kept up-to-date as far as documentation is concerned. Many of the guides are for previous versions of the product and can be cumbersome to follow at times.
Self-healing; our use of GFS required the administrator to trigger an auto-heal operation manually whenever bricks were added/removed from the pool. This would be a great feature to incorporate using autonomous self-healing whenever a brick is added/removed from the pool.
Performance metrics are scarce; our team received feedback that online RDBMS transactions did not perform well on distributed file systems (such as GFS), however this could not be substantiated via any online research or white papers.
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.
Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now having to purchase dedicated hardware and licenses to run it. Albeit, should an organization choose to pay for support for Gluster, they would be paying licensing costs to Red Hat instead of NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, or VMware. It could be assumed, however, that if an organization wanted to use Gluster, that they were already a Linux shop and potentially already paying Red Hat or Canonical (Debian) for product support, thereby the use of GFS would be a nominal cost adder from a maintenance/training perspective.
