Red Hat sticks its storage software cap on Supermicro hardware

Open-source software house Red Hat has jumped into bed with Supermicro to produce a single system combining its storage software with the server maker's hardware. Red Hat described Storage One as a pre-engineered turnkey system, automated by Ansible, which makes software-defined storage less of a DIY component-sourcing and …

[Nate Amsden]

no flash?

Seems most any NAS system today should come with at least some degree of flash either for tiering or better yet for caching(even if for just reads, and/or metadata).

Their general purpose NAS data sheet makes no mention of the word flash, has no mention of how much memory is available for cache(and how that memory is used e.g. mirrored write caching), the only mention of the word cache is with their Broadcom RAID controller with 2GB of cache. Given they are using hardware raid controllers, there are raid controllers that could handle the flash caching for them(I think broadcom has such controllers as well) if redhat software cannot do it by itself.

Hard for me to believe anyone would deploy 288TB (minimum configuration - 120TB usable so a considerable overhead) of storage and not have some amount of caching from flash involved. The nature of the system(likely aiming for lower cost) doesn't strike me as one that would be all-flash (also no mention of deduplication or compression, the latter being pretty nice to have for any NAS system).

The design seems more suitable for the content repositories, perhaps redhat is just trying to make their system appeal to a wider audience by throwing a "general" use case configuration in there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: no flash?

Each node has a 375 GB Optane add in card. This is not flash, but rather phase change memory (PCM) which is faster than flash, and does not have endurance issues as flash does. Also compression is part of the Gluster FS and is included. Dedupe is not available , but let's remember that de-dupe is CPU intensive and not all workloads benefit from it. This is a a capacity system using relatively inexpensive drives.

[jeffapplewhite]

Re: no flash?

There is an NVMe card which provides caching and performance acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: no flash?

I've 38TB of pr0n. Anything that can lubricate the delivery is welcome.

[pyite42]

Why Gluster instead of Ceph?

I suppose the obvious answer that more people are willing to pay for a pre-configured Gluster system, but maybe you could buy the Gluster config and replace it with Ceph fairly easily?

I went through both Red Hat traning modules and I can't imagine why someone would choose Gluster, unless it is already deployed of course. Nothing wrong with Gluster of course, I'm just not a fan of NAS-only solutions.

The CephFS NAS feature is now officially production ready, and I have had great luck with it so far. It is great to have a storage system that supports both block and NAS equally well.

Now if only Red Hat can get the Ceph cache tiering to production quality... it is the most important missing feature (since BlueStore is a foregone conclusion in the next major release)

I agree that the lack off SSD options is crazy these days. Presumably they have identified a good market to go after first.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Re: Why Gluster instead of Ceph?

Red Hat Storage Server is built around GlusterFS. Red Hat acquired the company that built Gluster quite some time ago. It's baked pretty hard into their infrastructure.

So this product is really just RHSS preinstalled on SuperMicro hardware. No big deal, I've got that exact combination all over my data centers and it works pretty well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why Gluster instead of Ceph?

> So this product is really just RHSS preinstalled

AFAIK, these days it's called RHGS, Red Hat Gluster Storage.

(So that you don't confuse it with RHCS, Red Hat Ceph Storage.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why Gluster instead of Ceph?

> maybe you could buy the Gluster config and replace it with Ceph fairly easily?

So you want to buy a turnkey system that comes with a Gluster license, throw away Gluster, and install Ceph?

If you want the hardware, and Ceph, then just do that. Super Micro will sell you the hardware, and Red Hat will sell you a Ceph license. (Or go with the free upstream Ceph, buI I don't know why you want the slow and complex storage; I know a lot of people that prefer fast and simple.)

You do know that Red Hat sells RHCS (Red Hat Ceph Storage), right? Just not on a single SKU with Ceph pre-installed on Super Micro hardware.