Red Hat Inc. has updated its Ceph Storage platform to expand the product’s versatility as an object storage platform, so it can be optimized to suit a range of workloads across deployments of any size.

The company’s Ceph Storage product is an open-source, software-defined unified storage platform that decouples software from hardware. The company said it’s a more cost-effective storage option to run on industry-standard servers, capable of scaling out to support multiple petabyte deployments.

The most obvious and interesting new feature in Ceph Storage 2.3 is the new, lightweight Network File System for the Ceph Object Gateway. The company said this allows users and applications to access the same data sets from both the new NFS and the S3 object file interfaces. The main benefit of this, according to Red Hat, is that customers still using older file storage can benefit from the scale, flexibility and cost efficiency of object storage even as they transition from their older infrastructure.

That’s exactly what call center technology provider Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc. has been doing with Ceph Storage, the company’s principal cloud architect, Rodney Polling, said in a statement. “The new NFS gateway can deliver scale out, software-defined, object storage to our legacy platform that still requires traditional file storage,” Polling said. “The greater flexibility and scalability enables us to continue working to cut deployment time and grow with our customers.”

Red Hat has also added compatibility with the Hadoop S3A file system client, which means big data software such as Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive and Spark can now be used alongside Ceph. As a result, customers can exploit native object storage features such as lifecycle and metadata management, and scale compute and storage independently of one another.

Finally, Red Hat has created another way to deploy Ceph Storage in containerized environments. The company is making available a container image of Ceph Storage in the Red Hat Container Registry, allowing for installations, upgrades and updates to be performed automatically.

The company said Ceph Storage 2.3 and its container image will both be available later this month.

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