CoprHD Now Supports Ceph

Last year, EMC announced the open sourcing of ViPR Controller, the world’s leading SDS controller as CoprHD (“copperhead”). Since then we have made tremendous progress, with multiple releases, and operating the project in the open. Recently we achieved another key milestone, the addition of support for RedHat’s Ceph project. CoprHD already supported EMC’s ScaleIO[1], a software-defined storage (SDS) solution for block storage, but it was important for us to continue to move the needle and add support for additional SDS solutions.

Here is a complete list of the commits that add Ceph support to CoprHD. A special thanks to Fedor Tersin on my team in Moscow for his hard work on this.

I think that CoprHD provides an ideal platform for reducing risk in your deployments, by allowing you to deploy multiple storage systems, aggregating them together, putting them in different “pools”, and using sophisticated scheduling systems to help with optimizing storage placement and management. Now, it’s possible to use CoprHD to help you manage Ceph and ScaleIO side-by-side, or to have an intermediate abstraction layer, that might make it easier to replace one with the other, reducing the “lock-in” factor.

(1) Limited up to 31 snapshots/clones of a volume in ScaleIO
(2) Neither supported due to a bug in common CoprHD code
(3) Ceph supports nothing similar to consistency groups
(4) Probably N/A

As you can see, we did our best to try and achieve as much parity with ScaleIO support as possible for Ceph. We are going to continue to update support for both ScaleIO and Ceph in CoprHD, improving it’s multi-vendor story, sustaining CoprHD’s lead as the #1 SDS controller in the world, and providing an open source point that gives you another tool to reduce switching costs related to “lock-in”.

[1] Along with many hardware-based storage platforms, both EMC and others, but that’s not particularly interesting for this posting.