CEPH
SOFTIRON - DELIVERING 21ST CENTURY INFRASTRUCTURE THE RIGHT WAY
At its core , SoftIron asks the question of how to deliver 21st century infrastructure to meet the evolving demands centred around factors like resilience , performance , accessibility , and environmental impact . “ We want to meet customers where they are . And we do that through building a set of task specific appliances that solve a variety of problems inside the data centre ,” explains SoftIron ’ s VP of Product , Craig Chadwell . SoftIron ’ s solutions range from software defined infrastructure solutions that touch the computing and networking spaces to specific solutions for media encoding . “ If you take a holistic view of solving a problem , you can deliver a solution that is resilient , but with performance that ’ s way beyond what a traditional commodity based solution could provide ,” says Chadwell .
SoftIron ’ s suite of storage solutions are powered by Ceph , but the entire company ’ s ethos is firmly aligned with the open source community as well . “ One of the core premises of SoftIron ’ s value proposition is this notion of no vendor lock-in . We provide solutions that enable our customers to effectively swap us out if they choose ,” Chadwell continues . “ Because of the way Ceph works and because organisations that comply with Ceph ’ s operating model can have products that work together seamlessly , it means that you can swap out a particular vendor ' s hardware without ever having to swap out Ceph , which means that everything above the Ceph layer from a service delivery perspective is unaffected by the lower level technology changes .
“Everybody needed storage , it needed to be scalable , and there was no open source option ; you had to buy expensive enterprise solutions ”
SAGE WEIL CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT , RED HAT
In addition to offering the unparalleled freedom to start from scratch , move freely within its ecosystem , and avoid both the vendor lock in agreements and cumbersome , expensive upgrade cycles that define managed , proprietary storage solutions , Weil adds that the beauty of Ceph is that “ Because it ' s so flexible and built to scale , Ceph doesn ' t require a lot of foreknowledge about where your organisation ' s going to be in a couple of years time . You can just expand your hardware footprint in whatever direction you end up growing .”
Large storage systems - the kinds that are increasingly coming to define the cloud and data centre industries - are fundamentally dynamic . They grow and change in new and unexpected directions in response to the market and , with Ceph , organisations can grow and change with as little friction as possible . “ You might start out with 10 servers from one vendor , and then five years later you ' re storing 12 times
64 February 2022