Fujitsu's ETERNUS CD10000: Better Ceph than sorry?

Storagebod So Fujitsu has announced the ETERNUS CD10000 – its latest storage product designed to meet the demands of the hyperscale and the explosion in data growth and it’s based on… Ceph.

It seems that Ceph is quickly becoming the go-to scale-out and unified system for those companies who don’t already have an in-house file-system to work-on. Red Hat’s acquisition of Ink Tank has steadied that ship with regards to commercial support.

It is hard to see why anyone would go to Fujitsu for a Ceph cluster, especially considering some of the caveats that Fujitsu appears to have put on its deployment. The CD10000 will scale to 224 nodes. That’s a lot of server to put on the floor just to support storage workloads – and yet Fujitsu appeared very wary about allowing you to run workloads on the storage nodes. This is despite the fact that the core operating system is Centos.

CephFS is an option with the CD10000, but the Ceph website explicitly says that this is not ready for production workloads – even with the latest release, 0.87 Giant. Yes, you read that right; Ceph is not yet a v1.0 release. That in itself will scare off a number of potential clients.

It’s a brave decision of Fujitsu to base a major new product on Ceph; it’s still very early days for Ceph in the production mainstream. But with large chunks of IT industry betting on OpenStack and Ceph’s close (but not core) relationship with OpenStack, it’s kind of understandable.

Personally, I think it’s a bit early and the caveats around the Eternus CD10000 deployment are currently limiting. I’d wait for the next release or so before deploying. ®