IBM Cephalocon Blog 2024

IBM

Industry trends:

Many clients are transforming their IT infrastructure to enterprise platforms because their mission critical applications are demanding a cloud native experience on premises with the following:

  • Web scale
  • On-demand consumption
  • Scalable elastic infrastructure
  • Platform-as-a-Service
  • Containers & Bare Metal
  • API on everything
  • Multi-protocol storage services (block, file, object)

Client requirements:

As IT leaders build out their enterprise platforms, they have the following requirements for the underlying enterprise storage platform:

  • Multiprotocol: deliver block, file and object from a single software platform
  • Software-defined: software solution that runs on commodity servers
  • Modular scalability: modular design that can scale up and down without disruption
  • Intelligent security: automatic protection, detection, and recovery from threats
  • Uniform control: Common unified control plane with standard APIs
  • API-driven: REST APIs to fully automate management tasks

Ceph capabilities:

Clients have issued vendor requests for proposals (RFP) for enterprise storage platforms and evaluated the responses. IT leaders have learned that only Ceph can meet their requirements for multiprotocol, software-defined enterprise storage platforms. None of the other alternatives can deliver all three protocols (block-NVMeoF, file-NFS,SMB and object-S3) from a single software-defined platform.

Clients that have implemented enterprise storage platforms on Ceph have reported 50% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and 67% faster deployment times.

IBM client examples:

A global 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%.

Another government agency 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 users, 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%.

A third global 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:

IBM employees and clients continue to make large contributions to the Ceph community to help mature the technology to maintain Ceph as the leading enterprise storage platform. Please join us in the community.