Book Image

Ceph Cookbook

Book Image

Ceph Cookbook

Overview of this book

Ceph is a unified, distributed storage system designed for excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. This cutting-edge technology has been transforming the storage industry, and is evolving rapidly as a leader in software-defined storage space, extending full support to cloud platforms such as Openstack and Cloudstack, including virtualization platforms. It is the most popular storage backend for Openstack, public, and private clouds, so is the first choice for a storage solution. Ceph is backed by RedHat and is developed by a thriving open source community of individual developers as well as several companies across the globe. This book takes you from a basic knowledge of Ceph to an expert understanding of the most advanced features, walking you through building up a production-grade Ceph storage cluster and helping you develop all the skills you need to plan, deploy, and effectively manage your Ceph cluster. Beginning with the basics, you’ll create a Ceph cluster, followed by block, object, and file storage provisioning. Next, you’ll get a step-by-step tutorial on integrating it with OpenStack and building a Dropbox-like object storage solution. We’ll also take a look at federated architecture and CephFS, and you’ll dive into Calamari and VSM for monitoring the Ceph environment. You’ll develop expert knowledge on troubleshooting and benchmarking your Ceph storage cluster. Finally, you’ll get to grips with the best practices to operate Ceph in a production environment.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Ceph Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Ceph scalability and high availability


To understand Ceph scalability and high availability, let's first talk about the architecture of traditional storage systems. Under this architecture, to store or retrieve data, clients talk to a centralized component known as a controller or gateway. These storage controllers act as a single point of contact for a client's request. The following diagram illustrates this situation:

This storage gateway, which acts as a single point of entry to storage systems, also becomes the single point of failure. This also imposes a limit on both performance and scalability while introducing a single point of failure, such that if the centralized component goes down, the whole system goes down too.

Ceph does not follow this traditional storage architecture; it has been totally reinvented for the next-generation of storage. Ceph eliminates the centralized gateway by enabling the clients to interact with the Ceph OSD daemons directly. The following diagram illustrates...