Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 arrives with erasure coding and cache-tiering

Today, we’re proud to announce the availability of Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2, a solution based on the Firefly release from the Ceph community. This latest version brings some major new features to enterprises – ones we believe will both further cement Ceph’s position as a leading storage solution for OpenStack infrastructure while promoting its adoption among enterprises looking to manage the explosion of unstructured data.

The first major new feature of Red Hat Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 is erasure coding. A data-durability feature for object storage, erasure coding can substantially lower the cost per gigabyte of storing large volumes of data because, in contrast to storing replicas with high overhead, erasure coding can achieve the same high level of protection against hardware failures while storing less data in a cluster. Erasure coding is particularly well suited for storing large amounts of write-once, read-infrequently data where performance is less critical than cost.

The second new feature of Red Hat Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 is cache tiering, a feature that can be used to either boost the performance of the Ceph block device for OpenStack users or to complement erasure coding to provide a fast or “hot” tier that hosts active data on faster media like SSDs. Cache tiering allows customers to define the cost-to-performance characteristics of individual data sets and automatically migrate data between hot and cold tiers based on demand. With more and more data having a “long tail,” being able to migrate data dynamically this way is now essential when managing large data sets.

In addition to erasure coding and cache tiering, the new Red Hat Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 product includes the latest version of newly open-source Calamari, the Ceph management platform that now adds cluster management to its monitoring capabilities. With this latest version of Calamari, users can define storage pools, set cluster settings and initiate changes to running processes in response to logs and notifications generated by the monitoring dashboard.

Delivered in one convenient installation package with the needed dependencies, Red Hat Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu and CentOS, and comes with full SLA-backed support services.

We’re excited about the interest Red Hat Inktank Ceph Enterprise has generated and the opportunities we believe it offers our customers. To learn more, attend our webinar on Wednesday, July 30. As we look toward our future product releases, we’re confident that the time has come for software-defined storage to fundamentally change the storage landscape.