Virtualization Storage Ledger 2026
Ledger
Virtualization Storage Ledger 2026
IBM Ceph: Virtualization Storage Ledger 2026 Scorecard
The enterprise Ceph with the deepest VMware path: NVMe/TCP, a vSphere plug-in and SRM adapters on a two plus one year support cycle, sold by IBM per TiB.
Edition October 16, 20268 min read
Where IBM Storage Ceph put its effort, 2016 to 2026
Each square is one capability area in one year. The brighter it is, the more the area gained in the Virtualization Storage Ledger that year; 1, 2 and 3 mark that year's biggest pushes.
| ’16 | ’17 | ’18 | ’19 | ’20 | ’21 | ’22 | ’23 | ’24 | ’25 | ’26 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data services core | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| Resilience and HA | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| Performance and protocols | 2 | 1 | 2 | ||||||||
| Hypervisor integration | 2 | 3 | |||||||||
| Scale and topology | 3 | ||||||||||
| Data protection and DR | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Security | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Operations and automation | 2 | 3 | |||||||||
| Hardware and deployment freedom | 3 | ||||||||||
| Kubernetes and containers | 1 | 2 |
no change+0.5+1+1.5 or moreScores out of 5 per area.
Biggest pushes overall: Kubernetes and containers (+4), Performance and protocols (+2), Data protection and DR (+2). Already strong in 2015: Scale and topology, Hardware and deployment freedom, Resilience and HA.
Top focus each year: 2016 Data protection and DR; 2018 Data services core; 2020 Kubernetes and containers; 2021 Resilience and HA; 2023 Security; 2024 Performance and protocols; 2025 Resilience and HA; 2026 Data services core. 3 of 11 years show no gain in any area.
Part of the Virtualization Storage Ledger (edition 2026-10-16). How the scores work: methodology.
Snapshot
- Type: product
- Owner: IBM (public, USA). Red Hat's Ceph and data services teams transferred to IBM on 2023-01-01; Red Hat, also IBM-owned, still lists Red Hat Ceph Storage 8 and 9 in its lifecycle table, and IBM documents a crossgrade from Red Hat Ceph Storage 9.1 to IBM Storage Ceph 9.9.1
- Engine: Ceph (upstream), on Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts
- Licence: Subscription under the IBM International Program License Agreement, capacity metric in TiB; editions Pro (own RHEL), Premium (RHEL included), Edge and Developer; free Pro installation with limits and a 60 day trial; list prices not published, one reseller lists Pro at CAD 43.99 per TB; also sold as IBM Storage Ceph as a Service from USD 0.026 per GB per month
- Latest release: 9.9.1 (GA announced 2026-06-25), with fix updates 9.9.1.1 and 9.9.1.2; 9.0 GA 2026-01-27
- Support lifecycle: IBM policy for 8.1 and later: two years of support, one year of critical fixes, three years of access to existing fixes; support tiers Standard, Advanced, Extended, Sustained. Red Hat's table gives Red Hat Ceph Storage 36 months plus 24 months optional Extended Life Support and upgrades between consecutive majors only
- Next milestone: None published
- Hypervisors: VMware ESXi over NVMe/TCP with VMFS datastores and VAAI (7.1, IBM Community 2024-06-11), vSphere plug-in and Site Recovery Manager adapters (9.0), ESXi 7.0U3 and later initiators (9.9.1); KVM hosts natively through librbd (Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Proxmox VE and others); OpenShift Virtualization through ODF external mode and the NVMe/TCP CSI driver (9.9.1); no Hyper-V path found
- Tier: Ceph family
- Archetype: Dependable builder
- Evidence grade: B. Release dates and features for 6.1 to 9.9.1 were read from IBM Community posts, IBM Support pages and trade press; the Red Hat lifecycle table and the IBM 9.9.1 documentation landing page from primary sources. Prices, calendar end-of-support dates and the upstream Ceph version inside each release were not found. The Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 to 6 steps (2016 to 2023) are dated from general knowledge of which upstream release each carried, not from pages read this session.
Scorecard
| Dimension | Score | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Capability today | 83.0 / 100 | higher is better |
| Momentum since end of 2022 | +12.7 points (2015 to 2022: +17.9) | higher is better |
| Credibility | 17.0 / 25 | higher is better |
| Commercial risk | 11.5 / 25 | lower is better |
| Technical lock-in | 8.0 / 25 | lower is better |
| Integrator fit | 13.0 / 20 | higher is better |
| AI leverage | 3.0 / 20 | higher is better |
| Ledger Index | 66.0 / 100 | balanced weights; see the methodology |
Capability by domain, 2015 to today
Scores 0 to 5 against fixed anchors; total is weighted to 100.
| Domain (weight) | 2015 | 2019 | 2022 | Today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data services core (15) | 2.5 | 3.5 | 3.5 | 4 |
| Resilience and HA (15) | 3.5 | 3.5 | 4 | 4.5 |
| Performance and protocols (12) | 2 | 3 | 3 | 4 |
| Hypervisor integration (12) | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 |
| Scale and topology (10) | 4 | 4 | 4.5 | 4.5 |
| Data protection and DR (10) | 2 | 3 | 3.5 | 4 |
| Security (8) | 2 | 2 | 2.5 | 4 |
| Operations and automation (8) | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 |
| Hardware and deployment freedom (5) | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4.5 |
| Kubernetes and containers (5) | 0 | 0 | 3 | 4 |
| Total / 100 | 52.4 | 59.8 | 70.3 | 83.0 |
Year by year: 2015: 52.4 · 2016: 54.4 · 2017: 54.4 · 2018: 59.8 · 2019: 59.8 · 2020: 67.0 · 2021: 70.3 · 2022: 70.3 · 2023: 71.6 · 2024: 74.0 · 2025: 76.8 · 2026: 83.0
What moved the score
| Year | Domain | Change | Points | Trigger |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Data protection and DR | 2 → 3 | +2.0 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 (Jewel base): RBD mirroring between clusters |
| 2018 | Data services core | 2.5 → 3.5 | +3.0 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 (Luminous base): BlueStore with inline compression, erasure-coded pools for RBD and CephFS |
| 2018 | Performance and protocols | 2 → 3 | +2.4 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 3: iSCSI gateway and NFS-Ganesha supported; all-flash BlueStore configurations documented |
| 2020 | Kubernetes and containers | 0 → 3 | +3.0 | OpenShift Container Storage 4 external mode: ceph-csi volumes with snapshots, expansion and ReadWriteMany file against a Red Hat Ceph Storage cluster |
| 2020 | Operations and automation | 2 → 3.5 | +2.4 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 4: dashboard with REST API, Prometheus, ceph-ansible playbooks |
| 2020 | Scale and topology | 4 → 4.5 | +1.0 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 (Nautilus base): PG autoscaler and device classes; edge and small-footprint configurations documented in later releases |
| 2020 | Security | 2 → 2.5 | +0.8 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 4: msgr2 on-wire encryption, dashboard roles |
| 2021 | Data protection and DR | 3 → 3.5 | +1.0 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 5: snapshot-based RBD mirroring, CephFS mirroring and stretch clusters for synchronous two-site protection |
| 2021 | Operations and automation | 3.5 → 4 | +0.8 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 5: cephadm orchestrator with rolling upgrades; later cephadm-ansible modules, Call Home to IBM Storage Insights, staggered upgrades; no Terraform provider found |
| 2021 | Resilience and HA | 3.5 → 4 | +1.5 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 (Pacific base): stretch clusters across two sites with a tiebreaker |
| 2023 | Kubernetes and containers | 3 → 3.5 | +0.5 | ODF 4.14 external mode: ReadWriteMany block and default StorageClass detection for OpenShift Virtualization |
| 2023 | Security | 2.5 → 3 | +0.8 | Red Hat Ceph Storage 6 and IBM Storage Ceph 6.1 (Quincy base): RBD per-image encryption, KMS integration for object storage; FIPS mode through RHEL |
| 2024 | Hypervisor integration | 3 → 3.5 | +1.2 | 7.1: NVMe/TCP block access for VMware with VMFS datastores and VAAI operations |
| 2024 | Performance and protocols | 3 → 3.5 | +1.2 | 7.1: NVMe/TCP gateway GA for VMware ESXi after a technology preview in 7.0; 8.0: NFS v3, v4.1 and v4.2, SMB technology preview |
| 2025 | Hardware and deployment freedom | 4 → 4.5 | +0.5 | 8.1: Arm nodes; IBM Storage Ready Nodes and the Fusion CS1 appliance are optional |
| 2025 | Resilience and HA | 4 → 4.5 | +1.5 | 8.1: stretch clusters with Arm nodes, RBD mirror consistency groups; 9.0: failover after an OSD failure and NVMe/TCP gateway failover both under 5 seconds; 9.9.1 adds stretch-cluster locality for NVMe/TCP |
| 2025 | Security | 3 → 3.5 | +0.8 | 8.0: IAM multi-tenancy; 8.1: Project Espial ransomware prevention and recovery, self-encrypting drive support |
| 2026 | Data protection and DR | 3.5 → 4 | +1.0 | 9.0: VMware Site Recovery Manager adapters give orchestrated failover; 8.1 RBD mirror consistency groups; 7.0 object lock WORM certification (2023-12-08); no immutable block snapshots, no backup vendor integration of its own |
| 2026 | Data services core | 3.5 → 4 | +1.5 | 9.0: faster erasure coding with extent overwrites, EC 5+2 and 6+2 added to 8+3, 8+2 and 4+2; no deduplication, no per-volume minimum QoS |
| 2026 | Hypervisor integration | 3.5 → 4 | +1.2 | 9.0: vSphere plug-in for snapshots and clones, Site Recovery Manager storage replication adapters, migration from vSAN to Ceph over NVMe/TCP; 9.9.1: plug-in updates from vCenter, ESXi 7.0U3 initiators; still no Hyper-V |
| 2026 | Kubernetes and containers | 3.5 → 4 | +0.5 | 9.9.1: NVMe/TCP CSI driver GA; Kubernetes-native management stays with OpenShift Data Foundation |
| 2026 | Performance and protocols | 3.5 → 4 | +1.2 | 9.0: SMB multichannel, 4096 NVMe/TCP namespaces per gateway group; 9.9.1: NFS over RDMA and NFS over TLS still technology previews; no Fibre Channel |
| 2026 | Security | 3.5 → 4 | +0.8 | 9.9.1: BYOK-encrypted NVMe/TCP namespaces, certificate management in the dashboard, RGW Public Access Block; NFS over TLS still a technology preview. Whether the 2026-08-19 CephX fixes (CVE-2025-30156 and three more) are in the 9.9.1.1 or 9.9.1.2 fix updates is not confirmed |
Direction, 2023 to 2026
Each release item carries one theme and one driver (V vision, C customer need, M market window, U upstream, P portfolio).
| Date | Item | Theme | Driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-01 | Red Hat's Ceph and ODF teams transfer to IBM; the product keeps a Red Hat-branded twin | Packaging | P |
| 2023-08 | 6.1: first IBM-branded release (GA 2023-08-18) | Packaging | P |
| 2023-12 | 7.0: WORM certification with object lock | Data protection | C |
| 2023-12 | 7.0: NVMe over TCP gateway as a technology preview, single gateway on a single node | Performance | M |
| 2024-06 | 7.1: NVMe/TCP GA for VMware users with VMFS datastores and VAAI | Hypervisor integration | M |
| 2024-11 | 8.0: NFS v3, v4.1 and v4.2, SMB technology preview, IAM multi-tenancy, Crimson technology preview | Performance | C |
| 2024-11 | 8.0: IBM Storage Ready Nodes | Hardware | P |
| 2025-03 | IBM Storage Ceph as a Service: managed on-premises offering | Packaging | P |
| 2025-06 | 8.1: automatic NVMe namespace load balancing and masking, RBD mirror consistency groups, stretch clusters, Arm | Resilience | C |
| 2025-06 | 8.1: Project Espial ransomware prevention and recovery | Security | V |
| 2026-01 | 9.0: faster erasure coding with 5+2 and 6+2 profiles, sub 5 second OSD and gateway failover | Data services | C |
| 2026-01 | 9.0: vSphere plug-in, Site Recovery Manager adapters, vSAN to Ceph migration over NVMe/TCP | Hypervisor integration | M |
| 2026-01 | 9.0: NFS over TLS technology preview | Security | C |
| 2026-06 | 9.9.1: NVMe/TCP CSI driver GA, BYOK namespaces, ESXi 7.0U3 initiators, FlashCore Module plug-in | Kubernetes | C |
| 2026-06 | 9.9.1: version numbering moves to V.R.M.F, so 9.0 is followed by 9.9.1 | Packaging | P |
| 2026-06 | 9.9.1: NFS over RDMA technology preview; Crimson still a technology preview | Performance | V |
- Centre of gravity: Packaging (4), Performance (3), Hypervisor integration (2)
- Blind spots (no items): Scale, Operations, Licensing, AI
- Driver mix: Vision 13%, Customer need 38%, Market window 19%, Upstream 0%, Portfolio 31%
- Idea-to-need index: 0.18 (0 = demand-pulled, 1 = thesis-pushed)
Credibility: 17.0 / 25
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Cadence | 4 | Two releases a year kept since 2024: 7.1 (2024-06), 8.0 (2024-11), 8.1 (2025-06), 9.0 (2026-01), 9.9.1 (2026-06); lifecycle published per version |
| Roadmap transparency | 2.5 | Documentation and release posts are public; no public roadmap or tracker for the IBM product; the upstream tracker is open |
| Say-do | 3.5 | NVMe/TCP went from technology preview (7.0) to VMware GA (7.1) in about six months; Crimson (since 8.0) and NFS over TLS (since 9.0) remain previews |
| Velocity | 4 | Several substantive capabilities per release: vSphere plug-in and SRM in 9.0, BYOK namespaces and the CSI driver in 9.9.1 |
| Lifecycle stability | 3 | The owner transfer, two brand names for one lineage, a new V.R.M.F numbering scheme and consecutive-major-only upgrades add churn; the two plus one plus three year policy itself is long |
Commercial risk: 11.5 / 25 (lower is better)
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Price and licence volatility | 2.5 | No list price published; metric is TiB; no change in terms found since 2023, which cannot be confirmed without the price list |
| Purchase constraints | 2.5 | Subscription only, four editions, Pro needs a separate RHEL licence; free Pro install limited; a 60 day trial exists |
| Channel and access | 2 | IBM direct, Business Partners and resellers; downloads need an IBM entitlement and images may become unavailable after a lapse unless mirrored |
| Owner stability | 2 | Large public owner; the storage business moved from Red Hat to IBM in 2023 and the Ceph and ODF portfolio was merged into one IBM group |
| Cost of staying supported | 2.5 | Two years standard plus one year critical fixes per release; Extended and Sustained tiers cost extra; upgrades only between consecutive majors |
Technical lock-in: 8.0 / 25 (lower is better)
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Formats | 0.5 | Standard RBD, CephFS and S3; same engine as upstream |
| Export path | 1.5 | A crossgrade path between Red Hat and IBM builds is documented; moving to community Ceph is technically the same engine but outside the supported paths |
| Stack coupling | 2.5 | Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts required; VMware reaches it only through the NVMe/TCP gateway |
| Hardware / cloud coupling | 1 | Any x86 or Arm server; Storage Ready Nodes and Call Home are optional |
| Skills and tooling coupling | 2.5 | Ceph skills plus IBM tooling (vSphere plug-in, Call Home, cephadm-ansible) |
Integrator fit: 13.0 / 20
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Partner programme openness | 3 | IBM Business Partner route and resellers; programme terms not read |
| Multi-tenancy and self-service | 3.5 | RGW IAM multi-tenancy since 8.0, pools, namespaces, dashboard roles; no portal or metering |
| API and infrastructure-as-code | 3.5 | REST API and cephadm-ansible modules documented; no Terraform provider found |
| Skills and certification | 3 | IBM training and Advanced Technology Group webcasts; no exam-based certification found |
AI leverage: 3.0 / 20
How the product uses AI, scored per year like capability. Only GA counts.
| Criterion | 2019 | 2022 | Today | Latest step |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI workload infrastructure | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2015: S3 and CephFS as data stores for AI; 9.0 is positioned for watsonx.data lakehouse workloads, with no GPU data path feature |
| AI platform stack | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2015: None |
| AI-assisted operations | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2015: None; Call Home to IBM Storage Insights is telemetry, no AI assistance found |
| Agent openness | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2015: REST API with tokens; no MCP server found |
Year by year: 2015: 3 · 2016: 3 · 2017: 3 · 2018: 3 · 2019: 3 · 2020: 3 · 2021: 3 · 2022: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2024: 3 · 2025: 3 · 2026: 3
AI say-do, 2023 to 2026: 0 AI items announced; 0 GA, 0 still preview, 0 pending, 0 dropped. IBM's AI statements for Storage Ceph are positioning (storage for watsonx.data and lakehouses); no dated AI feature was announced between 2023 and 2026.
IBM sells Storage Ceph as the data layer under its AI products and has not put AI inside the product. Operators get the REST API and Call Home telemetry; there is no assistant, no anomaly model beyond Project Espial's ransomware work, and no agent interface.
Reading
IBM Storage Ceph is upstream Ceph plus the pieces a VMware exit needs: a supported NVMe/TCP gateway since 7.1, a vSphere plug-in and Site Recovery Manager adapters since 9.0, FIPS through RHEL and a published two plus one year support cycle. That is why it scores above the engine on hypervisor integration, data protection and security while the data services line is identical. The costs are commercial rather than technical: subscription per TiB with no public price, RHEL hosts only, and one lineage sold under two brands after the 2023 transfer from Red Hat. Before buying, check which upstream Ceph release sits inside 9.9.1 and whether the 2026-08-19 CephX fixes have reached the fix update you will install, because IBM's pages do not say.
Open questions and items to re-score
- IBM list prices per TiB and the differences between the Pro, Premium, Edge and Developer editions were not found.
- Calendar end-of-support dates for 7.x, 8.0, 8.1 and 9.0 were not read; only the policy text was.
- The upstream Ceph release inside 9.0 and 9.9.1 is not stated on the pages read.
- Whether the 9.9.1.1 or 9.9.1.2 fix updates carry the 2026-08-19 CephX fixes (CVE-2025-30156 and three more) is unconfirmed.
- Project Espial GA status and the SMB GA date were not confirmed separately from release coverage.
- Whether Red Hat still sells Red Hat Ceph Storage outside OpenStack and OpenShift bundles was not confirmed.
- The years and upstream bases of Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 to 6 (2016 to 2023) come from general knowledge, not from pages read this session.
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