IBM Storage Ceph client examples

Modern data lake for AI and analytics: 

IBM clients are moving from traditional Hadoop architecture to modern analytics architecture based on IBM Storage Ceph and reducing their TCO while reducing their time to results.   

Large multinational retailer  

This IBM client was struggling with the cost, complexity, and performance limitations of their legacy Hadoop environment. The client faced huge annual maintenance costs for the legacy platform. The complexity of the Hadoop platform lifecycle forced them to remain working with older versions of analytics applications. The client was not able to run multiple or different versions of Hadoop instances while using the same dataset. The HDFS-based platform was not performing fast enough to support their streaming data workloads.  

The client replaced their legacy Hadoop environment with IBM Storage Ceph with S3A support which provides a bridge for Hadoop, Spark, and other analytics to directly access an object store. The S3 protocol offers a better data lake abstraction for the analytics software stack separating computing resources from storage resources for enhanced flexibility. IBM Storage Ceph Rados Gateway Multisite S3 replication also delivers out-of-the box disaster recovery capabilities.  

The client can now use multiple versions of their preferred analytics software and access the same datasets with different Hadoop versions. The client can also ingest data in both batches and streams.   This has resulted in faster time to results while also reducing the costs of the storage infrastructure with erasure coding.   

Global personal technology leader  

This IBM client was struggling with their legacy HDFS environment due to the tight coupling of compute and storage along with limits around scalability, erasure coding support, hardware alternatives and security. The client replaced HDFS with IBM Storage Ceph with open-source S3A interface, erasure coding, encryption at rest and inflight all running on open compute style hardware of their choice. The client had a parallel effort to modernize their analytics environment so IBM Storage Ceph support for Iceberg, Parquet, Trino and Apache Spark was also a benefit. In the end, the transition from HDFS to IBM Storage Ceph reduced their TCO by 50%.   

S3 on-premises object store for cloud applications: 

National bank 

This IBM client needed to serve over 20 million clients with internet banking and mobile banking applications with 100% uptime. IT leaders required an enterprise storage platform that could scale-out with S3 API connectivity and bi-directional active-active replication across three datacenter locations using secure token service (STS) to meet their stringent availability demands. IBM Storage Ceph met the availability and scaling requirements while providing the flexibility of open-source software defined storage coupled with multi-protocol and multi-tier enterprise support.  

National post service  

This IBM client was seeking to modernize their legacy infrastructure and applications with a new enterprise storage platform. The client was struggling with a legacy storage platform that was difficult to expand, difficult to secure, difficult to manage and expensive to maintain. As the client containerized their cloud applications that serve 35 million clients, they needed S3 object storage to store large amounts of unstructured data. The client turned to IBM Storage Ceph as their new enterprise storage platform. The open standard S3 APIs made it much easier to onboard new applications and services ultimately reducing deployment times by 67%. 

Modern block storage for VMware applications:  

IBM clients are moving VMware block applications to IBM Storage Ceph to improve agility and security compared to legacy solutions.  

Leading university in South Africa 

This IBM client is in the process of migrating their VMware applications from iSCSI to NVMe over TCP with IBM Storage Ceph. They want a more modern approach to enterprise storage platforms that can improve performance, agility, and administration while lowering total cost of ownership. This client depends on the lowest cost of ownership especially in terms of administration time given the limited IT resources they have within the organization. Enterprise storage platforms built on IBM Storage Ceph deliver these client benefits so the IT team can succeed.  

Global financial services firm 

This IBM client is planning to eventually migrate all their workloads to NVMe over TCP starting with their block workloads running on VMware.  The client wants to move away from proprietary initiators that lock them in and toward more open alternatives where they have the flexibility to change vendors and improve business agility. The client also wants to significantly improve the security compared to legacy block solutions by using mutual challenge handshake authentication protocol (CHAP), transport layer security (TLS) inflight encryption, and host IP tables.  The improved agility and security along with lower TCO are the compelling reasons this client is building an enterprise storage platform with IBM Storage Ceph. 

Conclusion: 

The most important characteristic of storage software for enterprise storage platforms is the ability to serve file, block, and object protocols from a single storage platform. This is how all the public cloud providers design their storage offerings: single software platform serving 80% of the applications running on commodity servers.  IBM Storage Ceph is the industry leading enterprise storage platform.  Nearly all other competitors must sell multiple solutions to meet this need, which increases client TCO and IT response time. Please join the IBM clients who have already started their transformation to modern enterprise storage platforms with IBM Storage Ceph. 

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August 2024 

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