IBM® Storage Ceph® is a software-defined storage platform that consolidates block, file and object storage to help organizations eliminate data silos and deliver a cloud-like experience while retaining the cost benefits and data sovereignty advantages of on-premises IT.

Storage Ceph runs on industry-standard x86 hardware, providing an easy and efficient way to build a data lakehouse for IBM® watsonx.data™ and next-generation AI workloads. It's also massively scalable—engineered with no single point of failure and able to support petabytes of data and tens of billions of objects.

To realize the benefits of an on-premises hybrid cloud strategy, organizations are working to bridge the architectural divide between IT Ops and DevOps. Traditional enterprise apps previously relied on block storage systems running in on-premises data centers. Now, they must work seamlessly with web-scale apps in bare metal and containerized environments connecting to the cloud by platform as a service. Storage Ceph is designed to bridge these different infrastructures, application architectures, and various management and consumption experiences.

Data stored in Storage Ceph can be accessed by block protocols (for structured data) and by AWS S3 compatible REST APIs (for unstructured data). This makes Storage Ceph ideal for both application storage and as back-end storage for data lakehouses. Storage Ceph also supports NVMe/TCP, which makes it a competitive alternative in many virtualized environments.

Features

• **Automatic workload redistribution: **Designed to be self-healing and self-managing, Storage Ceph rebalances data distribution throughout the cluster and handles failures without interruption, automatically recovering to the desired predefined data resiliency level.
• **Capacity planning: **Monitor capacity utilization and growth with storage analytics that enable customers to plan for future requirements and determine near-term capacity needs.
• **Data protection: **Access security features such as object lock for write-once-read-many (WORM) data governance and protection; FIPS 140-2 cryptography; key management integration and server-side encryption.

Benefits

• **Increase scalability: **Grow from as little as 3 nodes to thousands of nodes non-disruptively to address billions of pieces of information.
• **Manage costs: **Use software-defined storage built with open standards that keeps CAPEX and OPEX costs in line with underlying commodity hardware prices.
• **Unify storage: **Use a single platform that supports block, object and file storage combined to manage all your data, lowering costs significantly and helping customers handle exponential data growth.
• **Use and store data efficiently: **Use data reduction capabilities for disk usage optimization, partial or complete reads and writes with atomic transactions, replication and erasure coding for data protection, policy-based optimization, and much more.