New Inktank Ceph Enterprise Release: Deeper Red Hat Integration and More!

Last fall, when we launched Inktank Ceph Enterprise, our flagship product, our goal was to shake up the storage industry by bringing the flexibility and power of open source to enterprises who understand that existing storage solutions won’t scale much longer. Since launch, we’ve seen incredible demand and adoption from Fortune 500 companies who appreciate that storage in the next 10 to 20 years requires an open, software-defined technology with solid enterprise backing.

We used feedback from those Fortune 500 customers to create the first update to Inktank Ceph Enterprise–Version 1.1–which we now proudly announce. Inktank Ceph Enterprise v1.1 offers improved support for the Red Hat ecosystem, as well as updates to the product’s Calamari graphical manager and Ceph components.

We’re excited to have been working closely with Red Hat to bring the benefits of open source storage with Ceph to both enterprise and cloud customers. Last June, Red Hat launched its commercial OpenStack product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, or RHEL-OSP. Red Hat has now fully certified Inktank Ceph Enterprise v1.1 as a compatible storage backend for RHEL-OSP, which means customers can now deploy RHEL-OSP and use Inktank Ceph Enterprise as the complete, unified storage system for both object and block storage, confident that the functionality has been fully tested by both companies and is fully Inktank supported. As part of this release, we also added Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3–the commercial KVM-based hypervisor product–to the list of supported technologies that work with the Ceph Block Device (RBD).

The graphical manager in this release, Calamari, features a much improved dashboard that provides an at-a-glance view of the cluster’s major components, as well as a much-requested view into performance data, both per-pool and cluster-wide IOPs. We also overhauled the graphing system to provide zoom, pan, and resolution control.

As the final part of the release, we revved to the latest point release of Ceph (0.67.5), which contains a number of backports we at Inktank made from the Emperor release. Long-term support commitment for a particular version of Ceph is a key benefit of Inktank Ceph Enterprise, because it allows enterprises to benefit from the rapid, ongoing community development of Ceph but baked into a robust, enterprise product.

With Ceph solidifying its place as the number one distributed block storage option for OpenStack  and Inktank Ceph Enterprise being part of the storage strategy for major enterprises, we’re excited to allow businesses the opportunity to break free from expensive and proprietary legacy vendors and enjoy radical improvements in the economics and management of their storage. Contact us to find out more about the Future of Storage.