Managed storage with Ceph

Treat your open source storage infrastructure as a service

What if storage was like coffee: menu driven and truly service oriented? Everyone knows how quick and easy it is to order a cappuccino or cortado and have a friendly barista bring it to you in just minutes. Now imagine this is a user who needs some storage allocation. They browse a list of services, pick the one they like, and in no time at all a specialised operator responds to that request and provides allocated space, which the user’s application puts to work. They also take care of all of the Day-2 operations of the storage system!

Public clouds took this concept, called it ‘-as-a-service’ and ran with it, making access to compute, network and storage resources just a credit card transaction away. The convenience such a model offers is just half the benefit: the as-a-service model also frees companies from needing dedicated internal teams or expensive hiring.

That’s not to say this model doesn’t have its limitations. What if the economics of public clouds do not fit with your company’s revenue goals? Or do you still have significant on premise hardware resources? Or do you today not have the in-house expertise to operate an open source storage solution? Does that mean that you cannot have Storage-as-a-Service? In this blog, we’ll answer the most common questions that pop up when exploring managed storage and Storage as a Service (StaaS).

What is managed storage?

Managed storage is where you work collaboratively with an organisation like Canonical to deploy an open source solution (for example Ceph) on your hardware, in the location that makes the most sense for your workload, be that on-prem or in a near-cloud co-location facility. Canonical takes their proven reference architectures and applies them to your hardware, and use cases, potentially customising them as needed, to provide you with an on-demand storage solution. The solution is then managed end-to-end, removing the immediate need to have to train or hire staff to support new technologies.

Why would I use managed storage?

IT budgets are tighter than ever and while on-premise storage solutions bring with them lower costs, they also require management and maintenance. To provide similar uptime and operational experiences to your users means that an organisation needs to fully staff a 24/7/365 support team, which has an associated cost. That team also needs to have deep knowledge of all of the technologies that are used to provide the service too, and finding people with the correct skill set can be very difficult. Managed services allow you to access a larger scale support organisation that has true follow-the-sun coverage, and has a high level of expertise as they work with these technologies day in day out, and they are just a phone call or ticket away!

What if I use the public cloud, can I still use managed storage?

Absolutely! There are certain use cases where if you have a large enough volume of data financially it makes sense to co-locate a storage system close to a public cloud’s data centre. You can find out more about these use cases and how this process is done in our whitepaper, Cloud storage cost optimisation, in which we explore moving 2.5PB from popular public clouds to a fully managed Ceph solution. The savings gained from this kind of approach are over 50%!

Does a managed storage service lock me in?

Not at all. The managed storage solutions provided by Canonical are designed to fit into three phases. 

The first of these phases is deployment, where specialised engineers deploy the agreed architecture. Then we move into the management phase, where our team handles all day 2 operations, from security, observability to storage system upgrades and updates. Finally, there’s an optional phase, where organisations who wish to take over management of the storage system are free to do so with our structured training and hand over documentation providing a jumping off point. And of course, retaining remote support for high-severity cases is always an option.

Learn more

Download our whitepaper – Software-defined storage for enterprises, to learn more about:

• The budget challenges faced when scaling storage
• How open-source software-defined storage provides an alternative to appliance-based storage systems
• Scaling for growth and cost efficiency
• How to reduce data silos with consolidation into a single multi-protocol storage system
• How to prepare for disaster situations with local and remote data replication
• How managed services can provide an “as-a-service experience” while still reducing costs

Additional resources

• Website – What is Ceph?
• White paper – A guide to software-defined storage for enterprises
• White paper – Cloud storage cost optimization
• Webinar – Storage for AI