Storage at Cloud Scale for your Mission Critical Workloads

Your computing infrastructure is only as good as the ability to store the data your organization depends on reliably.  Your mission-critical workloads demand that your infrastructure deliver the scalability required for potentially millions of users and petabytes of storage.

Fortunately, you can solve this challenge with the containerization of open source Ceph when using bare-metal or Equinix Metal-hosted bare-metal clusters via Mirantis Container Cloud.

While your developers need a cloud storage solution, IT and Operations teams need a unified pool of storage that can be scaled by simply adding storage server nodes.  Legacy storage architectures were “scale-up” designs, in which additional storage arrays were added to a storage controller.   However, the storage controller had a finite capability to which it could connect and manage, thus placing a limit on how large the storage cluster could grow in a unified way.  To scale beyond a given “scale-up” limit required adding additional storage controllers, which meant additional elements to manage.

Ceph allows for a “scale-out” architecture, where scaling is done by adding additional Ceph nodes - which are nothing more than a standard compute node with a bunch of included storage, and the capacity within this node is combined with other Ceph nodes to provide a highly scalable, yet unified pool of storage.

Ceph is a unified, distributed storage system designed for excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. It is an open source software project to build scale-out storage that meets all of the above requirements that can be used as a primary storage solution for all storage types, including image storage, ephemeral storage, persistent block storage, and object storage. Mirantis makes Ceph available for both OpenStack virtualized and Kubernetes container workloads when deployed on bare-metal and Equinix Metal-based bare-metal clusters.

Mirantis delivers Ceph in a containerized fashion, providing a number of benefits in terms of performance, reliability, and scalability.  Let’s take a look at a few of these benefits:

• Scale-Out Storage: Scale-up storage no longer works. Clouds require storage to scale out by simply adding nodes.

• Self-Healing and Resilience in Software: Resilience in a cloud gets moved to the software layer as opposed to the hardware layer.

• Automated: Storage in a cloud environment needs to be automated both for IT/OPS and for developers.

Open Source: Open source is a must in cloud environments. Open source ensures velocity, access to continuous innovation, and no lock-in.

Managing all the components that comprise your private cloud infrastructure can be a challenge for one cloud.  Fortunately, Mirantis Container Cloud is here to help simplify the deployment, management and observability of your cloud infrastructure through a single pane of glass.  Mirantis Container Cloud provides the ability to leverage on-prem (VMware, OpenStack, and bare metal), hosted bare-metal with Equinix Metal, and public cloud with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

For your bare metal, or hosted bare-metal private cloud deployments, Mirantis Container Cloud manages the storage infrastructure by deploying Ceph using Rook--an open source cloud native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes. The combination of these provides a distributed storage system that is self-managing, self-scaling, and self-healing--and automates the day-to-day task of the storage administrator to deploy, configure, scale, upgrade, and monitor the storage sub-system.

When your storage requirements grow, Mirantis Container Cloud makes it easy to expand your capacity by adding additional storage nodes through the UI, or, should your data requirements reduce, you can likewise easily remove or reallocate these storage nodes, to right-size to your needs.  In order to transition to fully cloud native architecture, Mirantis offers a unique value proposition by enabling you to consolidate your existing Mirantis Kubernetes Engine deployments with dedicated Ceph functionality for already-deployed MKE clusters via the “Bring Your Own provider” capability in Mirantis Container Cloud.

Thanks to the power of Kubernetes and the containerization of Ceph, the storage subsystem is continuously monitored, and should a component fail due to software or hardware issues, Kubernetes will proactively detect and restart the failing components. This monitoring provides for a high level of resiliency, ensuring business-critical applications can operate without interruption.  

If you would like to learn more about how Ceph can help you deliver highly scalable, resilient storage for your mission critical workloads, we invite you to visit our website to learn more about our Ceph offerings, as well as Mirantis Container Cloud, Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes and Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. If you’re ready to jump in and give it a try, download our free trials today.