SoftIron: Unified Storage Manager for Management of Ceph Software and Storage Hardware

SoftIron Ltd. is launching its anticipated HyperDrive Storage Manager, promising to simplify the management of Ceph software and storage hardware.

Ceph is considered to be the leading open-source software that underpins enterprise level SDS solutions. Whilst it is powerful, it is also complex, requiring specialist technicians to deploy and manage the software. This complexity has inhibited the true potential of Ceph and has been an obstacle for Ceph deployment for many organisations.

Addressing this challenge, the company created Storage Manager, an unified system to simplify the management of Ceph software and storage hardware.

“We’ve always been committed to making software-defined storage simple, and so we’re thrilled to finally bring Storage Manager to the SDS and Ceph community. Customers have been asking for something like this for a while now, and we’ve spent a great deal of time working with them and leading Ceph experts to deliver it. It really is the first of its kind and is going to make this powerful technology so much more accessible,” says Tim Massey, CEO, SoftIron.

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The solution is a simple, feature-rich management tool that reduces the overhead of Ceph management and is set to be a game-changer for system administrators, allowing Ceph to be adopted by organisations for the first time.

Storage Manager is delivered via aan online interface, allowing administrators to:

• Simplify and centralize the management of HyperDrive and Ceph

• Update, monitor, maintain and upgrade HyperDrive nodes

• Manage file shares SMB (CIFS) and NFS, object stores (S3 and Swift), and block devices (iSCSI and RBD)

• Remove the complexity of maintaining several hardware and software solutions

• Gain visibility into Ceph storage health, current utilization and predicted storage growth

All this is delivered via an online interface which is for storage administrators or help desk personnel who are responsible for managing storage configuration or shares.

Massey says: “We know we’ve solved a huge problem for the industry; this is going to revolutionise the way in which organisations administer their storage by creating better transparency and alleviating technician expertise for more worthwhile projects, thus saving time and money. We’re really proud of the team and look forward to the feedback.“