Ceph storage is an open-source cloud-native software-defined storage system well-known for its resilience and scalability. Many companies choose Ceph as their low-cost enterprise-class storage solution. Organizations need in-house Linux administrators to plan, deploy and manage Ceph clusters.

Ambedded endows Ceph with a strong affinity by offering a turn-key Ceph appliance solution. Ambedded’s Mars 500 NVMe Ceph Appliance tightly integrates Ampere Altra Arm Server and UniVirStor. UniVirStor (UVS) is a software package that includes Linux, Ceph, and Ceph management GUI (UVS Manager).

UniVirStor automates deployment, management, operation, and maintenance of Ceph cluster applications. The Mars 500 Ceph Appliance server has a 32-cores Ampere Altra Arm processor, eight NVMe SSDs, and two ports 25Gb NICs.

In addition, Ambedded Technology continuously invests engineers in tuning and validating the configurations over computing, memory, network, and the UniVirStor to ensure the storage system’s optimum reliability and performance at a feasible cost.

Mars500 comes with the new UVS manager version 3. It has many new features that enable storage administrators to deploy, monitor, and manage the ceph cluster by a graphical user interface and automated processes without using any command lines. New features include a redesigned dashboard, host management, CRUSH map, RBD snapshot schedules, mirroring, and multi-site object storage.

*Fig1. UVS Manager- host management on ceph cluster, with Mars 500 NVME ceph storage, to have overall view on Network, OSD disk type, definition on OSD, MGR, MON and RGW.

*Fig2. User can see the ceph nodes management on UVS manager, it monitors the network, PG number, smart status on disk, to have an overall understanding on his ceph cluster.

*Fig3. A Ceph GUI management allows you to define your ceph cluster CRUSH map and CRUSH rule, in consideration of cluster high availability.

*Fig4. RBD mirroring function on UVS 3.0, it allows the users to configure the data mirroring between 2 clusters in different sites.

Because of the Ampere Arm technology, the server consumes only 180 Watts of power at a high workload. Compared to the x86 server CPUs, it reduces carbon emissions and saves energy costs without sacrificing performance. Ampere Altra provides industry-leading power efficiency/core, establishing new levels of power efficiency with scalability. Additionally, the Ampere Altra processor provides extensive enterprise server-class RAS capabilities. Data in memory is protected with advanced ECC in addition to standard DDR4 RAS features.

According to Ambedded’s test report, a three 32 CPU cores appliances cluster could offer up to 155K read, and 33K write IOPS in ceph. The maximum performance is proportional to the number of appliances. Customers can add devices to scale out the capacity and performance on demand.