Background

Software Designed Storage

Ceph and Gluster are software storage solutions that run on commodity hardware, stitching the local storage available on several standalone hosts into a single, resilient and high-performance storage system.

Commonly marketed under the term Software Defined Storage, these systems can help avoid the expense and scalability limitations of conventional vendor storage devices such as SANs and NASs.

Is it right for me?

Storage capacity requirements can be hard to predict and traditional SANs can be inflexible if not right-sized at the outset either due to limited expansion capability or hard limits on the performance of controller hardware.

Ceph and Gluster capacity and performance scale horizontally with the addition of each new host.

Traditional vendor storage is typically composed of specific hardware, software and storage capacity that operate and are purchased together with no option to select the most appropriate or cost-effective vendor for each.

Software Defined Storage decouples the hardware and software which can reduce vendor lock-in and allow the freedom to select the most appropriate vendor for each case.

Benefit from a Technical Team with experience operating Ceph and Gluster in a production setting and with a data security focus.

Why choose The Bunker?

The Bunker have been Ceph and Gluster users for several years and have amassed a great deal of experience deploying the software in production platforms over this time.

We offer Ceph and Gluster Storage solutions either vendor-supported by Redhat or in-house supported on Debian, Ubuntu or CentOS Linux distributions.

Our Ceph and Gluster experience includes the data security focus you would expect from The Bunker with production experience of Ceph and Gluster Data Encryption at rest, High-Availability and Disaster Recovery abilities.

How Software Designed Storage works

The Ceph and Gluster storage software handles the co-ordination of data access and placement across a pool of servers, ensuring that clients have a highly-available and co-ordinated method of access and that data is replicated reliably across the infrastructure. The software handles the failure of individual disks, nodes, racks and sites in a configurable manner to ensure data availability within the constraints you define.

Ceph offers block, file and object storage interfaces to consume the distributed storage. Block, File and Object capabilities can be augmented with iSCSI, SMB, NFS and S3-compliant gateway technology to make the storage visible to non-Linux consumers where required.

Gluster offers a predominantly file-based storage interface which can be exposed either natively on Linux or through SMB or NFS to non-Linux consumers.

Being some of the more popular Open Source distributed storage systems, Ceph and Gluster have integrations with many other systems such as KVM/QEMU, OpenNebula and Kubernetes that can orchestrate storage provisioning and management.

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