London-based startup SoftIron is making a bold claim for its HyperDrive Storage Router for enterprises that are using Ceph.
In Tuesday's announcement, SoftIron said its Hyper Driver Storage Router was the first "truly unified" Ceph solution that can incorporate all of an enterprise's storage protocols.
SoftIron's router is a gateway for software-defined storage (SDS) that supports the various protocols en route to helping enterprises adopt Ceph. One of the benefits of the SDS approach is that it allows enterprises' storage solutions to scale as the organizations grow.
Ceph is one of the leading open source software solutions for SDS, but one drawback is that Ceph isn't able to support all of the services an enterprise may need, according to SoftIron. While Ceph works with block, object, and file storage protocols, it is unable to simultaneously provide for end users such as iSCSI, NFS, SMB/CIFS, according to SoftIron.
“HyperDrive Storage acts as the intermediary between all of these different protocols, finally allowing businesses to leverage Ceph as their unified storage solution. As you can imagine, this massively reduces the complications, delays, and costs that administrators would have had to deal with in the past,” said SoftIron CEO Tim Massey, in a prepared statement. “It unlocks the exponential potential of Ceph and SDS and allows the entire enterprise to benefit from this technology, regardless of the end user.
"HyperDrive Storage Router has been built as a services gateway that can have different services modules added as features or requirements grow over time. The benefit for our customers is long-term scalability and considerable cost reductions," Massey said.
Paired with SoftIron's HyperDrive Storage Manager, enterprises can manage their storage solutions via a unified online management system that cuts down on management complexity and overhead, according to SoftIron.
Massey used an enterprise's deployment of VMware as an example of what the storage router can accomplish.
"You may want to consolidate all of your storage on Ceph and that is where you would use Storage Router," he said. "It exposes iSCSI block services to VMware while at the same time storing all data within the Ceph cluster, maintaining all of the benefits of Ceph for the enterprise."
The big claim by Massey was that the HyperDrive Storage Router "will do for SDS what Uber did for transport." Other vendors in the SDS space include Red Hat, IBM, Lenovo, HPE and Dell EMC.
The Linux Foundation's OpenSDS, which was founded three years ago, is working on policy-based, self-service storage provisioning and orchestration for cloud-native applications as well as traditional data centers and clouds.