Hardware

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Get a high level guidance on selecting hardware for use with IBM Storage Ceph.

Software-defined storage presents many advantages to organizations that seek scale-out solutions to meet demanding applications and escalating storage needs. With a proven methodology and extensive testing with multiple vendors, IBM simplifies the process of selecting hardware to meet the demands of any environment. Importantly, the guidelines and example systems that are listed in this document are not a substitute for quantifying the impact of production workloads on sample systems.

IBM Storage Ceph significantly reduces the cost of storing enterprise data and helps organizations manage exponential data growth. The software is a robust and modern petabyte-scale storage platform for public or private cloud deployments.

IBM offers mature interfaces for enterprise block and object storage These interfaces make IBM Storage Ceph an optimal solution for active archive, rich media, and cloud infrastructure workloads characterized by tenant-agnostic OpenStack® environments1. Delivered as a unified, software-defined, scale-out storage platform, IBM Storage Ceph allows businesses to focus on improving application innovation and availability by offering capabilities such as:

  • Scaling to hundreds of petabytes2.

  • No single point of failure in the cluster.

  • Lower capital expenses (CapEx) by running on commodity server hardware.

  • Lower operational expenses (OpEx) with self-managing and self-healing properties.

IBM Storage Ceph can run on myriad industry-standard hardware configurations to satisfy diverse needs. To simplify and accelerate the cluster design process, IBM conducts extensive performance and suitability testing with participating hardware vendors. This testing allows evaluation of selected hardware under load and generates essential performance and sizing data for diverse workloads ultimately simplifying Ceph hardware selection. Multiple hardware vendors now provide server and rack-level solutions optimized for IBM Storage Ceph deployments with IOPS, throughput, and cost and capacity-optimized solutions as available options.

1 Ceph is and has been the leading storage for OpenStack according to several semi-annual OpenStack user surveys.
2 See Yahoo Cloud Object Store - Object Storage at Exabyte Scale for details.