Personas

The personas that are presented here embody the most common roles of Red Hat Ceph Storage users. You can simply understand the meaning of the word as “user role”.

In Red Hat Ceph Storage, there are three types of personas, namely the Storage Administrator, the Storage Operator and other Storage-related personas.

Storage Administrator

The primary persona for Red Hat Ceph is the storage administrator. A Ceph storage administrator performs the following tasks:

  • Installs, configures, and maintains a Ceph storage cluster.

  • Educates infrastructure architects about Ceph capabilities and features.

  • Informs users about Ceph data presentation and methods, as choices for their data applications.

  • Provides resilience and recovery, such as replication, backup, and disaster recovery methods.

  • Automates and integrates through Infrastructure as Code.

  • Provides access for data analytics and advanced mass data mining.

Storage Operator

The secondary persona for Red Hat Ceph is the storage operator.Storage operators primarily use the Ceph Dashboard GUI to view and respond to cluster alerts and statistics. They also perform routine storage administration tasks that are defined as Dashboard workflows, such as replacing a failed storage device.

Other personas that use Ceph directly include application developers, project managers, and service administrators with data processing, data warehouse, big data, and similar application needs. The storage administrator frequently communicates with these personas.

  • Cloud Operator

    A cloud operator administers cloud resources at their organization, such as OpenStack or OpenShift infrastructures. The storage administrator works closely with a cloud operator to maintain the Ceph cluster that is configured to provide storage for those platforms.

  • Automation Engineer

    Automation engineers frequently use Ceph directly. An automation engineer is responsible for creating playbooks for commonly repeated tasks. Storage administrators would be familiar with these same actions because they are typically the foremost Ceph subject matter experts.

  • Application Developer (DevOps Developer)

    An application developer can be an original coder, maintainer, or other cloud user who is responsible for the correct deployment and behavior of an application. A storage administrator coordinates with the application developer to ensure that storage resources are available, sets quotas, and secures the application storage.

  • Deployment Engineer (DevOps Engineer)

    In larger environments, dedicated personnel perform, manage, and tune application deployments, working with the storage administrator and the application developer.

  • Application Architect

    A storage administrator relies on the application architect as a subject matter expert who can correlate between Ceph infrastructure layout and resource availability, scaling, and latency. This archicture expertise helps the storage administrator to design complex application deployments effectively. To support the cloud users and their applications, a storage administrator must comprehend those same aspects of resource availability, scaling, and latency.

  • Infrastructure Architect

    A storage administrator must master the storage cluster’s architectural layout to manage resource location, capacity, and latency. The infrastructure architect for the Ceph cluster deployment and maintenance is a primary source of information for the storage administrator. The infrastructure architect might be a cloud service provider employee or a vendor solutions architect or consultant.

  • Data Center Operator

    Personas at the lower Ceph storage infrastructure layer support data provisioning. Data center operators are typically employed by the public cloud service provider or the organization’s internal IT group in a private data center cloud. The storage administrator opens service tickets with the relevant public cloud service provider or internal IT group.

The Basic Architecture

Ceph Storage is essentially a distributed data object store, based on RADOS(Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Storage), which provides highly reliable, scalable, and self-healing distributed object storage.