Red Hat Ceph Storage

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 create a shared storage pool using locally attached storage on multiple ESXi hosts. VSAN is designed to be highly available, and it can automatically detect and recover from hardware failures.Ceph, on the other hand, is an open-source software-defined storage solution that can run on a variety of different hardware and virtualization platforms. It provides object, block, and file storage in a single platform, and is designed to be highly scalable and highly available. Ceph is also known for its ability to handle large amounts of data, and it can be integrated with a wide variety of different applications and services.In terms of functionality, VSAN is more suited for virtualized environments, as it is built into vSphere and it is designed to work well with vSphere's other features such as vMotion and DRS. Ceph on the other hand provides more flexibility as it can run on multiple platforms and it can handle more types of storage like object, block and file storage.I

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 customer-specific customizations in Red Hat Ceph Storage

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.

I have not experienced any other reliable storage platform. This software catches up with the daily changes in our workloads. It caters to all our market demands and effectively safeguards every information that is generated from our company. The installation and deployment process takes place faster as compared with other products. The data backup plan is very reliable and has helped us to recover most lost data.

Red Hat Ceph storage offers an object store, which the other solutions do not. In addition, it is perfect for providing scalable block storage to virtualization products.

Red Hat Ceph storage is most comparable with VMware Virtual SAN which we currently use in production. It had about the same default resiliency although we had far more customization options with Ceph albeit more difficult to configure. VMware Virtual SAN is such an expensive item that it was worth it for us to explore Ceph as an alternative. Both had similar cons of being best mated with their preferred hypervisors (Open Stack as opposed to VMware ESXi) and neither had NFS access.

Netapp was less performant than our Ceph cluster with cache tiering and far more proprietary however it does have NFS support which is crucial when being used as a storage back end for VMWare. We found our Netapp to be far less resilient as well as it does require regular maintenance.

We found for our medium sized business that the Nutanix had the upgradability, NFS support, and performance and much of the resiliency of Ceph so we decided to go in that direction. If our company where operating at petabyte scale however, Ceph is hands down the best solution available!