Introduction

Ceph is an open-source distributed storage system designed for efficiently storing and managing vast data sets. This system comes with inherent recovery and monitoring features and supports a variety of storage backends. Moreover, Ceph is gaining popularity as a solution for managing data in large-scale cloud-based infrastructures.

Benefits

Scalability

One of the most significant advantages of Ceph is its scalability. Ceph can support thousands of client nodes, and by adding nodes to the cluster, you can easily expand both capacity and performance. Data is dynamically distributed, ensuring a consistent load distribution. This allows users to meet their storage requirements cost-effectively.

Reliability

Ceph offers high durability and availability. Using replication and fault-tolerance techniques, it stores data across multiple physical locations, ensuring the system continues to operate without data loss even if one or multiple nodes fail. In practice, I’ve managed two Ceph clusters, 20 terabytes and 50 terabytes, for over two years and never encountered significant issues during that time. Sometimes, I even forgot I was using Ceph. There was one instance when I had to add a new OSD due to a disk failure. Nevertheless, there were no service downtimes throughout that period. The automatic recovery feature rearranges the data in the event of a failure, ensuring availability.

Affordability

As open-source software, Ceph can be used without any initial investment. Additionally, since it operates on standard hardware platforms, there’s no need to purchase expensive dedicated hardware. This significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) required for building and managing a large-scale storage solution.

Deployment Automation

When discussing deployment automation, one cannot overlook ‘cephadm.’ Introduced in version 15.2.0, cephadm revolutionized the previously complex deployment methods. In the past, deployments required methods like ceph-deploy or ansible, but now deployment is simple with just cephadm. Notably, cephadm utilizes docker container technology for deployment, eliminating concerns about installing various libraries on each server. Moreover, through cephadm, deployment and upgrades are already automated, offering users much more convenient system management.

Conclusion

Despite the introduction of various cloud-based storages recently, Ceph remains a trusted and powerful solution. Supporting fs, radosgw (s3), and rbd (block device) all in one solution, Ceph’s usage is expected to continue to increase for the foreseeable future.