If we make a comparison between Ceph and other storage solutions available today, Ceph clearly stands out of the crowd due to its feature set. It has been developed to overcome the limitations of existing storage systems, and it has proved to be an ideal replacement for old and expensive proprietary storage systems. It's an open source, software-defined storage solution on top of any commodity hardware, which makes it an economic storage solution. Ceph provides a variety of interfaces for the clients to connect to a Ceph cluster, thus increasing flexibility for clients. For data protection, Ceph does not rely on RAID technology as it's getting limited due to various reasons mentioned earlier in this chapter. Rather, it uses replication and erasure coding, which have been proved to be better solutions than RAID.
Every component of Ceph is reliable and supports high availability. If you configure Ceph components by keeping redundancy in mind, we can confidently say that Ceph does not have any single point of failure, which is a major challenge for other storage solutions available today. One of the biggest advantages of Ceph is its unified nature, where it provides out-of-the-box block, file, and object storage solutions, while other storage systems are still incapable of providing such features. Ceph is suitable to store both small as well as big files without any performance glitch.
Ceph is a distributed storage system; clients can perform quick transactions using Ceph. It does not follow the traditional method of storing data, that is, maintaining metadata that is tied to a physical location and filename; rather, it introduces a new mechanism, which allows clients to dynamically calculate data location required by them. This gives a boost in performance for the client, as they no longer need to wait to get data locations and contents from the central metadata server. Moreover, the data placement inside the Ceph cluster is absolutely transparent and automatic; neither the client nor the administrators have to bother about data placement on a different failure zone. Ceph's intelligent system takes care of it.
Ceph is designed to self heal and self manage. In the event of disaster, when other storage systems cannot provide reliability against multiple failures, Ceph stands rock solid. Ceph detects and corrects failure at every failure zone such as a disk, node, network, rack, data center row, data center, and even different geographies. Ceph tries to manage the situation automatically and heal it wherever possible without data outage. Other storage solutions can only provide reliability up to disk or at node failure.
When it comes to a comparison, these are just a few features of Ceph to steal the show and stand out from the crowd.