Release Notes

Dell PowerEdge R730xd Performance and Sizing Guide for Red Hat Ceph Storage - A Dell Red Hat Technical White Paper 5
Executive Summary
Data storage requirements are staggering, and growing at an ever-accelerating rate. These demanding
capacity and growth trends are fueled in part by the enormous expansion in unstructured data, including
music, image, video, and other media; database backups, log files, and other archives; financial and
medical data; and large data sets, aka “big data”. Not to mention the growing data storage requirements
expected by the rise of the internet of things (IoT). Yet with all these demanding capacity requirements,
customer expectations for high reliable and high performance are greater than ever.
As IT organizations struggle with how to manage petabytes and even exabytes of ever-growing digital
information, the adoption of cloud-like storage models is becoming more common in modern data
centers. One answer is the software known as Ceph.
Ceph is an open source distributed object storage system designed to provide high performance,
reliability, and massive scalability. Ceph implements object storage on a distributed computer cluster, and
provides interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage. Ceph provides for completely distributed
operation without a single point of failure, and scalability to the petabyte level. Ceph replicates data and
makes it fault-tolerant. As a result of its design, the system is both self-healing and self-managing, helping
to minimize administration time and other costs. Since Ceph uses general-purpose hardware, controlled
by software whose features are exposed through application programming interfaces (APIs), it is
considered to be a type of software-defined storage (SDS).
Red Hat Ceph Storage is an enterprise-ready implementation of Ceph that provides a single platform
solution for software-defined storage that is open, adaptable, massively scalable, technologically
advanced, and supported worldwide. Red Hat Ceph Storage combines innovation from the open source
community with the backing of Red Hat engineering, consulting, and support. It includes tight integration
with OpenStack services and was built from the ground up to deliver next-generation storage for cloud
and emerging workloads.
This technical white paper provides performance and sizing guidelines for Red Hat Ceph Storage running
on Dell servers, specifically the Dell PowerEdge R730xd server, based on extensive testing performed by
Red Hat and Dell engineering teams. The PowerEdge R730xd is an award-winning server and storage
platform that provides high capacity and scalability and offers an optimal balance of storage utilization,
performance, and cost, along with optional in-server hybrid hard disk drive and solid state drive (HDD/SSD)
storage configurations.
This paper is intended for storage architects, engineers, and IT administrators who want to explore the
advantages of using Red Hat Ceph Storage on Dell PowerEdge servers and who need to design and plan
implementations using proven best practices.