Red Hat today announced the Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 storage platform, the first Ceph Enterprise release since Red Hat acquired Inktank.
Red Hat announced the acquisition of privately held Inktank on April 30 for $175 million in cash. While the new Inktank release is the first under Red Hat’s ownership, it was not directly influenced by Red Hat’s engineering processes.
The Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 storage platform is the last solution developed and delivered by the Inktank team’s product and engineering processes, Ross Turk, director of product marketing for storage and big data at Red Hat, told eWEEK.
“There has been great early collaboration in a variety of areas, but this is the release that we had under way prior the acquisition,” Turk said. “Now that this update is complete and available in the market, we will turn our focus to integrate with Red Hat’s development and delivery processes.”
From a sales and partnering perspective, Turk noted that Inktank is now beginning to integrate with Red Hat’s sales and partnership channels.
Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 release is based on the open-source Ceph Firefly (0.80.x) release. The 0.80 Ceph Firefly release first debuted in the community back in May and gains enterprise hardening and tooling in the Ceph Enterprise release.
Among the major new features in Ceph Enterprise 1.2 are erasure-coding and cache-tiering capabilities. Erasure coding is a technology that provides forward error correction for storage, giving users a higher degree of storage stability and resilience.
The new cache-tiering features enable storage administrators to create storage levels for different types of data. Active or hot data can be placed on one tier with better performance, while inactive or cold data can be placed on a lower performance storage tier.
The other big new addition in Inktank Ceph Enterprise is the inclusion of the Calamari 1.2 Ceph management platform, which lets administrators manage individual devices as well as storage pool policies. Prior to the Red Hat acquisition, Calamari was a proprietary tool, but that has now changed.
“Shortly after the acquisition in May 2014, Red Hat announced that Calamari had been open-sourced as part of the upstream Ceph community,” Turk said.
Ceph is only one part of Red Hat’s total storage portfolio. Red Hat also has Gluster, which is a technology platform it acquired back in 2011 for $136 million and is the basis of the Red Hat Storage product.
Turk noted that Ceph and Gluster each serve different use cases. “Inktank Ceph Enterprise delivers world-class object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack,” Turk said. “Combined with Red Hat’s existing Gluster-based file storage offering, the addition of Inktank positions Red Hat as one of the leading providers of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.