Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.2 Available

Article written by Colleen Corrice, director, marketing communications, posted on January 22, 2019

BlueStore: Improved performance with Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.2

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.2 is now available.

The big news with this release is support for the BlueStore Ceph backend, offering increased performance for both object and block applications.

First available as a technology preview in Ceph Storage 3.1, Red Hat, Inc. has conducted performance tuning and testing work to verify that BlueStore is now ready for use in production environments. With the 3.2 release,

Red Hat Ceph Storage has attributes that make it suitable for a range of use cases and workloads, including:
• Data analytics: As a data lake, Ceph Storage uses object storage to deliver massive scalability and HA to support demanding multitenant analytics workloads. Disparate analytics clusters can be consolidated to reduce cost of ownership, lower administrative burden, and increase service levels. BlueStore helps improve performance, while support for erasure coding helps reduce overall storage costs for data protection over simple replication.
• Hybrid cloud applications: Ceph Storage is for on-premise storage clouds. Because Ceph Storage supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) interface, applications can access their storage with the same API, whether in public or private clouds.
• OpenStack applications. Ceph Storage is popular for OpenStack applications. V3.2 can offer improved performance for OpenStack deployments, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Erasure coding for RADOS Block Device (RBD) is available as a Technology Preview in this release.
• Backup target. A growing list of software vendors have certified their backup applications with Red Hat Ceph Storage as a backup storage target:

• Veritas NetBackup for Symantec OpenStorage (OST) cloud backup – versions 7.7 and 8.0 
• Rubrik Cloud Data Management (CDM) – versions 3.2 and later 
• NetApp AltaVault – versions 4.3.2 and 4.4 
• Trilio, TrilioVault – versions 3.0
• Veeam Backup & Replication – version 9.x

BlueStore performance
BlueStore is about performance. For HDD-based clusters, it architecturally removes the double-write penalty incurred by the traditional FileStore backend. Additionally, it provides performance enhancements in configurations that use all SSDs or NVM Express or NVMe drives.

The architectural shift to a BlueStore backend has already shown performance improvements on community Ceph distributions. Testing by Micron in 2018 demonstrated up to 2x increases in performance with the BlueStore over the traditional FileStore backend.

Micron conducted BlueStore vs. FileStore object testing and reported performance improvements in terms of both improved throughput and reduced latency.

4MB objects
100% writes
• 88% increase in throughput
• 47% decrease in average latency

70%/30% reads/writes
• 64% increase in throughput
• 40% decrease in average latency

Micron also conducted BlueStore vs. FileStore block testing and reported higher IO/s and lower latency.

4K random blocks
100% writes
• 18% higher IO/s
• 5% lower average latency
• Up to 70%+ reduced 99.999% latency
70%/30% reads/writes
• 14% higher IO/s
• 80%+ lower read tail latency
• 70%+ lower write tail latency

Upgrades and new installs
Both the BlueStore and FileStore backends coexist in Ceph Storage 3.2. Existing Ceph Storage 2.5 and 3.1 clusters retain the FileStore backend when upgrading to version 3.2. Newly created Ceph Storage clusters default to the BlueStore backend.