Smarter Private Cloud Architecture Starts with Faster, Simpler Storage.
As organizations accelerate their migration to agile on-premises clouds, selecting a high-performance storage stack for OpenStack, OpenShift, and Kubernetes environments is critical.
Historically, enterprises have turned to Ceph Storage—and its commercial enterprise distribution, Red Hat Ceph Storage—as an open-source unified platform for private cloud workloads, persistent container volumes, and data lakes. While Ceph excels at horizontal scalability, its underlying legacy architecture introduces heavy operational complexity and strict performance bottlenecks for modern workloads.
Lightbits LightOS delivers the ideal alternative or augmentation strategy to maximize your block storage performance. Natively engineered for NVMe-over-TCP, Lightbits shatters Ceph’s limitations:
- 16X Higher Throughput: Tap into the true power of flash storage with an optimized direct data path.
- Ultra-Low Latency: Consistently maintain under 100-microsecond response times at cloud scale.
- 50% Hardware Reduction: Lower your TCO and eliminate complexity by requiring fewer copies of your data to maintain strict SLAs.
Running Ceph + Lightbits in parallel delivers better cost efficiency and performance. Here’s how it works:
- Ceph stays: cost-effective for batch jobs, archives, general file service, and non-latency-sensitive workloads.
- Lightbits takes over: business-critical latency-sensitive databases, real-time analytics, and high-transactional workloads delivering up to 16X performance, 50%+ lower TCO using up to 5X less hardware.
What is Ceph storage? Ceph is an open-source, software-defined storage platform designed to provide a single, highly scalable system for object, block, and file storage. What is Red Hat Ceph storage? Red Hat Ceph Storage (RHCS) is the commercial, enterprise-grade distribution of the open-source Ceph storage platform.
Highly-Rated by Customers on Gartner
Compared to other primary storage platform vendors, Lightbits Labs earns 4.7 stars on Gartner Peer Reviews.
Lightbits Comparison with Ceph Storage
| Ceph Storage | Lightbits | Lightbits Advantage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speed (Throughput) | Good. Limited by Ceph’s NVMe-oF gateway | 16x faster than Ceph | Ceph’s NVMe-oF gateway introduces additional architectural complexity, leading to bottlenecks and increased storage networking latency. Lightbits is engineered for direct and high-performance host connectivity. |
| Latency | High latency in large clusters | Low latency (typically under 100 microseconds) | |
| Data Persistence | Yes, but slower | High persistence with built-in data resilience | Lightbits provides better persistence features, ensuring reliability and fast recovery. |
| Scalability | Scalable, but can require significant resources for large clusters | Seamless scalability with automatic expansion | Ceph may need more manual intervention when scaling. |
| Automation | Minimal. Difficult to support in a production environment. | Fully automated management features. Simple to manage at scale. | Lightbits offers better automation features for easy integration with DevOps processes. |
| Cost Efficiency | Requires more hardware to reach the same performance levels as Lightbits | Industry-leading price-performance value | Lightbits is more cost-effective for performance-sensitive workloads at scale |
| Storage Architecture | Open-source, distributed object, file, and block storage architecture originally intended for HDDs, many core design elements optimizing HDD behavior remain | Designed with NVMe over TCP with a focus on performance, scalability, resiliency, and cost-efficiency. | Ceph offers a more traditional distributed storage model, whereas Lightbits focuses on NVMe storage for superior performance. |
| Cloud Integration | Yes, but can be complex to manage | Simple and seamless integrations with Kubernetes, OpenShift, and OpenStack | Ceph requires more customization. |
| Data Protection | Strong data protection via replication and erasure coding | Advanced data protection with built-in redundancy and persistence | Lightbits offers advanced protection and data resilience compared to Ceph’s traditional approaches. |
| Support | Fail recovery time is significantly longer, and debugging is extremely complex. Innovation and development are declining over time. | Fast failover is measured in seconds for HA, and rebuild/restart times are measured in minutes with routine, monthly software releases. | Lightbits’ architecture is designed to prioritize rapid restoration of service and data integrity with an Engineering team dedicated to your success. |
Ceph Storage Challenges for OpenStack, OpenShift, and Kubernetes
Advantages and Disadvantages Of Ceph Block Storage
Why is Ceph Storage Not Enough for Modern Workloads?
Ceph Storage Challenges for OpenStack, OpenShift, and Kubernetes
Ceph Storage offers significant benefits in terms of scalability and flexibility, its complexity and resource requirements necessitate careful planning and management, especially in dynamic environments like Kubernetes, OpenStack, and OpenShift.
Operational Complexity:
Ceph can have complex configurations and require specialized expertise to implement and manage which can increase OpEx.
Resource Management:
Ceph can be resource-intensive, requiring significant CPU, memory, and network resources to achieve higher levels of performance—especially for the block storage. Proper HW provisioning is crucial to avoid performance bottlenecks. Both of which can add to infrastructure, CapEx, and OpEx costs.
Performance Tuning:
Good Ceph performance is dependent on a robust and high-performance network. Network latency and bandwidth can significantly impact Ceph’s performance.
Advantages and Disadvantages Of Ceph Block Storage
While Ceph storage is a good choice in many situations, it comes with some disadvantages too.
Advantages
» Despite its limited development history, Ceph is free and is an established storage method.
» The application has been extensively and well-documented by the manufacturer.
» A great deal of helpful information is available online for Ceph regarding its setup and maintenance.
» The scalability and integrated redundancy of Ceph storage ensure data security and flexibility within the network.
» CRUSH algorithm of Ceph ensures high availability.
Disadvantages
» To be able to fully use all of Ceph’s functionalities, a comprehensive network is required due to the variety of components being provided.
» The set-up of Ceph storage is relatively time-consuming, and sometimes the user cannot be entirely sure where the data is physically being stored.
» It requires significant engineering resources and oversight to implement and manage
Why is Ceph Storage Not Enough for Modern Workloads?
While there is no denying the fact that Ceph is highly scalable and a one-size-fits-all solution, it has some inherent architectural loopholes. Ceph storage is not suitable for modern workloads for the following reasons:
1. Organizations either working with the public cloud, using their own private cloud or supporting modern applications require low latency and consistent response times. While BlueStore (a back-end object store for Ceph OSDs) helps to improve average and tail latency to an extent, it cannot necessarily take advantage of the benefits of NVMe flash.
2. Modern workloads typically deploy local flash, (local NVMe flash), on bare metal to get the best possible performance and Ceph is not architected to fully leverage the performance of this media. In fact, Ceph in a Kubernetes environment where local flash is recommended, can be an order of magnitude slower than local flash.
3. Ceph has a comparatively poor flash utilization (15-25%). In case of a failure with Ceph or the host, the rebuild time for shared storage needs can be very slow because of massive traffic going over the network for a long period.