Red Hat Inc. today announced a new release of its Ceph Storage platform, based on the most recent Nautilus release of the Ceph open-source project.

Red Hat Ceph Storage is a software platform that provides highly scalable object, block and file-based storage in a unified system. It’s designed to run on commodity hardware and uses an algorithm known as Controlled Replication Under Scalable Hashing to ensure data is evenly distributed across clusters and that all nodes can retrieve data rapidly, without any bottlenecks.

Ceph can be accessed via Amazon Simple Storage Service and OpenStack Swift Representational State Transfer-based application programming interfaces, or via a native API for integration with software applications.

Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 comes with some enhancements that make it ideal for cloud-native application development, artificial intelligence and data analytics workloads, the company said.

On the performance side, various improvements under the hood have made Red Hat Ceph Storage twice as fast at writing intensive workloads, the company said. Data management and data placement tasks can now be automated too, and there are new self-healing capabilities for backup, recovery and provisioning activities. Ceph Storage 4 is optimized for organizations’ need to store and manage the rapidly growing volumes of data without requiring additional operations staff to do so, the company said.

Other updates include a simplified installer experience, which enables standard installations to be completed in just 10 minutes, plus a new management dashboard that provides a unified “heads up” view of operations to help teams identify and resolve any problems they find more quickly. There’s also a new quality-of-service monitoring feature that helps users to verify storage quality of service for apps hosted in multitenant cloud environments.

Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 has also been integrated with IBM Corp.’s Spectrum Protect
and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus data protection offerings. That’s not unexpected, since IBM has been working to integrate many of Red Hat’s offerings with its own products after acquiring the company last year.

The updates are welcome because storage remains a critical component for next-generation applications that are necessary in today’s era of digital transformation, said Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller.

“Making installation, operation and monitoring easier for enterprises is a good true north,” Mueller said. “That’s what Red Hat is doing with the support the latest Ceph storage release. Integration with IBM‘s storage offerings is a bonus and sign of a working integration strategy.”

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