Open-source Linux provider Red Hat Inc. Monday said Monday it’s adding new capabilities to its popular Ceph Storage platform, making it more versatile than before.

The company’s massively scalable object and block storage product now supports file storage in OpenStack deployments. Other new capabilities include the ability to deploy Ceph in application containers, plus greater support for legacy storage platforms.

For the uninitiated, Red Hat’s Ceph Storage platform provides object, block and file-based storage under a unified system. The system is deployed on multiple servers, which cooperate to provide a unified storage system that can handle petabytes of data while providing increased performance and capacity.

Up until today’s release, Ceph’s file storage capabilities were still in preview. That has changed with the general availability of CephFS, a scale-out file system that complements the existing block and object storage support. Red Hat said customers will now be able to incorporate storage more effectively in OpenStack deployments, supporting a number of new use cases, including Network Functions Virtualization and development and compute clouds.

Red Hat has also done a lot of work to enable Ceph Storage 3 to be deployed in application containers, which are used to ensure software runs reliably across multiple platforms by abstracting the code away from the hardware that runs it. By deploying containerized storage daemons, users can run the platform on fewer servers than before by co-locating services that previously required their own dedicated hardware. The company makes some big claims about the cost benefits of this, saying that its tests show customers can reduce hardware expenditure by an average of 24 percent.

“Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 represents a key milestone for OpenStack, VMware, and Windows communities in need of a unified storage solution,” said Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager of storage at Red Hat. “With this release, Red Hat lays the groundwork for all software-based storage services to be delivered as containers in the future while helping customers increase agility and shrink deployment costs.”

On top of this, Red Hat said, Ceph Storage is now compatible with the Internet Small Computer System Interface, which is a transport layer protocol that describes how packets should be transported over a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or TCP/IP network, the kind used on the internet. Essentially, what this means is that customers can now enable Ceph Storage in VMware and Windows environments that lack a native Ceph driver.

Other updates to the platform include dashboard redesign that includes a new graphical view of cluster’s data usage and more automation features that make everything easier to manage.

The company said Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 will become generally available later this month.

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