Item: Red Hat Ceph Storage
Rating: 10
Author: Asad Khan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Red Hat Ceph Storage is an excellent solution to manage the data of your data center. I use it to manage the data of telco applications called as VNFs & it provides automatic software-defined storage management for your cloud rack without a dependency on 3PP storage vendors like EMC & NetApp. The replication, resilience & recovery mechanisms are just awesome. Red Hat Ceph Storage gives you the flexibility to define separate storage pools (fast or slow pools) for separate applications & these pools can be defined on top of supported storage devices like SSD or NVMe. Once you setup Red Hat Ceph Storage then you don't have to worry about data replication & recovery unless & until it is a hardware fault.

Pros and Cons

Data replication
Data recovery (in case of a HDD fault)
Ease of maintenence via Ceph CLI

GUI based mainetenence should be developed
Unable to detect storage latencies
VM to disk mapping should be visible so as to save some critical applications data in case of HDD failures

Most Important Features

Self healing
Vendor agnostic
Provisioning of Block storage

Return on Investment

Cost saving in terms of capex (you can reduce EMC & NetApp like dependency)
One time setup & then easy provisioning of storage
Requirement of competent engineers for maintenence

Alternatives Considered

Red Hat Gluster Storage

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

Key Insights

Do you think Red Hat Ceph Storage delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Red Hat Ceph Storage's feature set?

Yes

Did Red Hat Ceph Storage live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Red Hat Ceph Storage go as expected?

Would you buy Red Hat Ceph Storage again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for large-scale private data centers & almost all the places where mission-critical data is handled like -

Enterprise
Telcos
Healthcare
Banking
IT, etc

This is because ceph provides you data management capabilities without 3rd party storage vendors

Less appropriate for POCs & lab environments because of initial setup complexities

Red Hat Ceph Storage Review

Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat Ceph Storage