Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/18/red_hap_ups_ceph_enterprises_game/

Red Hat drops Calamari into pan: Now we're cooking with gas

Management tool lands on plate

By Chris Mellor

Posted in SaaS, 18th July 2014 13:45 GMT

Carmine headgear-sporting open-sourcer Red Hat has made a refreshed version of its Ceph Enterprise product available, adding the ability for it to manage high-access rate hot data and across the data lifecycle to cold archival data.

Ceph is an open source distributed object storage system which Red Hat added to its armoury by buying Inktank for about $175m in May. It can have block and file interfaces as well. Ceph Enterprise is a paid-for version. Customers sometimes use Ceph as an alternative to Swift in OpenStack deployments.

Ceph Enterprise 1.2 adds:

Calamari is an on-premise Ceph cluster management app which Red Hat open sourced in May.

Ceph_Roadmap

Ceph 1.2 and roadmap. Quotas prevent abuse with pool or object user storage limits.

Ceph Enterprise 1.2 is supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 and 7, Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, and Centos 6.4 and 6.5.

Steven Stover, Dell’s director of engineered solutions, said: “We look forward to delivering Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 to our customers in our Dell Red Hat Private Cloud Solutions.”

Get a Ceph Enterprise datasheet here (PDF).

Seafoodnote: The term “Ceph” comes from the word cephalopod, a class of molluscs which includes the octopus and squid. The word “cephalopod” is based on ancient Greek words for head ( κεφαλή pronounced ke-pha-lee) and leg ( πόδι pronounced po-dhi).

Calamari is fried squid and, of course Inktank hooks into that concept by referring to squids' storage of black ink (melanin pigment in ink sacs) which it can squirt into the water to obscure itself when enemies approach.