Ceph and Gluster Software-Defined Storage: Poised for Greatness?

Software-defined networking (SDN) is already poised to be a major trend in 2014. But software-defined strorage, a similar technology, may join it, if the explosive growth of open source storage platforms Ceph and GlusterFS over the last year is any indication.

Like SDN, which abstracts networking from the physical infrastructure to provide more flexibility and robust features, SDS frees data from the constraints of physical storage. That approach allows vendors to achieve goals such as greater scalability and portability for data.

Inktank, the company that plays the leading role in developing the open source Ceph code and in October introduced a value-added implementation of the platform called Inktank Ceph Enterprise, recently announced that its customer base grew by 294 percent in 2013. It credited adoption of Ceph-based OpenStack storage solutions, along with OEM and reseller partnerships, with fueling that growth.

Ceph also enjoys momentum within the open source community. According to Inktank, the pool of developers contributing to the Ceph code base grew from 130 to 203 over the last year, and the project received coding support from companies that included Intel (INTC), SUSE and CloudWatt.

But Ceph is only half of the open source SDS story. GlusterFS, another SDS platform that is the flagship product of the broader Gluster project and enjoys heavy backing from Red Hat (RHT), also took off in 2013. It gained new partnerships with companies including Citrix (CTXS), as well as integration with key complementary open source platforms, including Samba. And it boasted performance benchmarks that trumped Ceph’s, at least in testing commissioned by Red Hat.

Whether Ceph and GlusterFS will eventually coexist peacefully remains to be seen. It does seem a pretty sure bet, however, that open source SDS will continue to play a vital part, alongside technologies like OpenStack and Hadoop, in private and public cloud deployments.