In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- An overview of Ceph
- The history and evolution of Ceph
- Ceph and the future of storage
- The compatibility portfolio
- Ceph versus other storage solutions
Ceph is an open source project, which provides software-defined, unified storage solutions. Ceph is a distributed storage system which is massively scalable and high-performing without any single point of failure. From the roots, it has been designed to be highly scalable, up to exabyte level and beyond while running on general-purpose commodity hardware.
Ceph is getting most of the buzz in the storage industry due to its open, scalable, and distributed nature. Today, public, private, and hybrid cloud models are the dominant strategies for the purpose of providing massive infrastructure, and Ceph is getting popular in becoming a cloud storage solution. Commodity hardware is what the cloud is dependent on, and Ceph makes the best use of this commodity hardware to provide you with an enterprise-grade, robust, and highly reliable storage system.
Ceph has been raised and nourished with an architectural philosophy which includes the following features:
- Every component must be scalable
- There can be no single point of failure
- The solution must be software-based, open source, and adaptable
- Ceph software should run on readily available commodity hardware
- Everything must self-manageable wherever possible
Ceph provides great performance, limitless scalability, power, and flexibility to enterprises, thereby helping them get rid of expensive proprietary storage silos. Ceph is an enterprise-class, software-defined, unified storage solution that runs on commodity hardware, which makes it the most cost-effective and feature-rich storage system. The Ceph universal storage system provides block, file, and object storage under one hood, enabling customers to use storage as they want.
The foundation of Ceph lies on objects, which are its building blocks. Any format of data, whether it's a block, object, or file, gets stored in the form of objects inside the placement group of a Ceph cluster. Object storage such as Ceph is the answer for today's as well as the future's unstructured data storage needs. An object-based storage system has its advantages over traditional file-based storage solutions; we can achieve platform and hardware independence using object storage. Ceph plays intelligently with objects, and replicates each object across clusters to improve reliability. In Ceph, objects are not tied to a physical path, making objects flexible and location-independent. This enables Ceph to scale linearly from the petabyte level to an exabyte level.