ProphetStor Data Services, Inc., Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. and Mellanox Technologies, Inc. today announced that they have joined forces to build and promote a reference cloud computing platform based on the open-source projects OpenStack and Ceph, leveraging each company's respective strength in software-defined-storage, state-of-the-art server hardware, and high-speed networking.

Based on ProphetStor Federator® SDS, this joint project addresses the key issues of OpenStack's storage management solution as well as improving the functionality and performance of Ceph, the de facto storage backend for OpenStack.

Federator is a suite of data services software that includes storage management and orchestration, storage virtualization, I/O traffic modeling, elastic resource control, business continuity, disaster recovery, data migration, and copy management. When integrated with Ceph, Federator offers the following benefits to cloud service providers:

--  Automatic deployment of Ceph clusters through PXE (Preboot Execution
    Environment)
--  Simplified OSD and pool management with disk striping and grouping
--  IOPS performance classification and provisioning
--  Enterprise-grade features such as decompression, deduplication, thin-
    provisioning, RAID, snapshot, clone, and rollback
--  Trending graphic reports with an analytics engine
--  Optimized journal performance with SATA or NVMe SSDs
--  Much lower latency with iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) enabled by
    Mellanox switches and network adapter cards (NICs)

As a part of its effort to transition to a full cloud-based backend to support its dev-test environment and all future mobile applications, One of the largest investment banks in the People's Republic of China had conducted a thorough evaluation of this reference platform in terms of deployment, management, enterprise storage features, fault tolerance, recovery, performance, monitoring and analytics metrics. As indicated in its 68-page lab report, the sample deployment satisfied, and in most cases, surpassed all success criteria. The Ceph cluster achieved random read performance of up to 40,000 IOPS per node and random Read-Write (70-30%) performance clocked in at 20,000 IOPS per node.

ProphetStor, GIGABYTE, and Mellanox will engage in product integration and technology validation, prior to co-marketing the bundled solution through their perspective sales teams and channel partners worldwide next year (2016).

"Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift for the server hardware manufacturers," said Etay Lee, General Manager, Network & Communication Business Unit, GIGABYTE. "The hardware infrastructure is only as powerful as the software it runs, and vice versa. As a hardware company, we strive to identify first-class software vendors and collaborate with them to create tried-and-true total solutions for our customers. We are extremely pleased to have this opportunity to work with ProphetStor Data Services to broaden our reach in the marketplace of software-defined data center and together bring cloud computing to a whole new level."

The end user application requirements represent only a fraction of the overall bandwidth needed. The Ceph network must handle OSD heartbeat, data replication, cluster rebalancing and recovery traffic. As a result, cluster (back-side) traffic significantly exceeds public (front-side) traffic under normal operating conditions and creates a large burden on the network fabric.

"Ceph is a perfect use case for Mellanox's high-speed Ethernet switches," said Kevin Deierling, Vice President Marketing, Mellanox Technologies. "Our SX1012 40Gb/s Ethernet switches and adapters increase Ceph performance while lowering the deployment costs. We are excited to be an enabling partner of ProphetStor and GIGABYTE for the scale-out cloud computing project. This is one of the best opportunities to showcase our networking capabilities in areas where they really count."

"When it comes to cloud platforms, enterprise customers are looking for total solutions instead of individual hardware and software components," said Eric Chen, ProphetStor CEO. "Teaming up with leading server and networking hardware manufacturers such as GIGABYTE and Mellanox allows us to recommend a select sets of hardware-software configurations that are fully integrated, optimized and validated so we can deliver to our mutual customers a converged OpenStack solution with expanded features and much improved scale-out storage performance."