Data—it's a simple word that stores the past, present, and future of the entire universe, and it's the most critical element of any system that exists today. We live in an era of technology that is generating enormous amount of data each second, and with time, this data growth will be unimaginable. However, how do we store this ever-growing data such that it remains secure, reliable, and future ready? This book is about one of the storage technology game-changers that will redefine the future of storage.
Ceph is an open source technology that is leading the way in providing software-defined storage. Ceph is an excellent package of reliability, unified nature, and robustness. It is more complete and economic than any other storage solution present today. Ceph has developed its own entire new way of storing data; it's distributed, massively scalable, with no single point of failure, and the best part is that it runs on commodity hardware, which makes it amazingly economic. It will give you power to break the knots of expensive vendor lock-in solutions and switch to enterprise-grade open source technology for all your storage needs.
Ceph has been enriched with enterprise-class features such as high degree of reliability, robustness, scalability, erasure coding, cache tiering, and many more. The maturity that Ceph has gained over the period of a decade makes it stand out in a crowd and lead the way to storage. It is the technology of today and the future; unified Ceph storage system is the solution for whatever requirements you have for data storage. Ceph is truly unified, that is, it has files, blocks, and objects in a single storage system; this makes Ceph extremely flexible and adaptable to all your data needs. It is the answer to all the data storage problems you have.
Cloud computing is the next paradigm shift, and a storage system such as Ceph is the most essential component of the cloud infrastructure. Ceph has its big footprint in the cloud storage area. It has been a leading open source software-defined storage choice for cloud platforms such as OpenStack and CloudStack. These cloud platforms leverage the features of Ceph and deliver robust, scalable, and exabyte-level public or private cloud infrastructures. In addition to this, virtualization platforms such as KVM and libvirt support Ceph big time, and support from proprietary virtualization solutions such as VMware and HyperV is on the way.
Ceph is surely the next big thing in the storage industry, which is backed by Inktank, now a part of Red Hat. Ceph has an amazing community presence and quick development cycles, making it more reliable a couple of times a year. Though Ceph is purely open source, one can enjoy enterprise-support subscriptions from Red Hat and their partner ecosystem, which is an advantage.
Chapter 1, Introducing Ceph Storage, covers the evolution, history, as well as the future of Ceph. This chapter explains common storage challenges and how Ceph deals with them and becomes the game-changer. It also covers a comparison of Ceph with other storage systems.
Chapter 2, Ceph Instant Deployment, covers instant, step-by-step practical approaches to deploy your first Ceph cluster. It includes a guided tour of creating the Ceph sandbox environment on VirtualBox as well as scaling it up.
Chapter 3, Ceph Architecture and Components, dives deep into the Ceph internal architecture, explaining each and every component in detail. Components are explained sequentially and practically for greater learning and correlation.
Chapter 4, Ceph Internals, covers how Ceph manages data; the practical content will help you understand every piece of it. It also covers CRUSH, placement groups, and pools in detail.
Chapter 5, Deploying Ceph – the Way You Should Know, covers hardware planning required for a production-grade Ceph cluster. It also includes practical approaches of building a Ceph cluster in both the manual and automated ways using ceph-deploy.
Chapter 6, Storage Provisioning with Ceph, includes practical hands-on approaches to explain files, blocks, and object type storage in Ceph and how to configure and provision each type. The chapter also covers snapshots, cloning, S3- and swift-compatible object storage, and much more.
Chapter 7, Ceph Operations and Maintenance, covers everything to manage and operate Ceph from a system admin point of view. It includes daily operations, scaling up and down, hardware replacement, and a detailed coverage on CRUSH management and its advanced concepts.
Chapter 8, Monitoring Your Ceph Cluster, makes you competent in monitoring your Ceph cluster and all of its components. It also covers open source Ceph monitoring dashboard projects such as Kraken and ceph-dash and their installation and configuration.
Chapter 9, Integrating Ceph with OpenStack, covers step-by-step practical approaches to set up your own test OpenStack environment and integrating it with Ceph. It explains how Ceph benefits OpenStack and how OpenStack components make use of Ceph.
Chapter 10, Ceph Performance Tuning and Benchmarking, covers advanced concepts of Ceph, such as performance tuning from both hardware and software points of view. It also includes hands-on approaches to erasure coding and cache tiering and discusses Ceph benchmarking tools.
The various software components required to follow the instructions in the chapters are as follows:
VirtualBox 4.0 or higher (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads)
CentOS operating system 6.4 (http://wiki.centos.org/Download)
Ceph software packages Version 0.78 or higher (http://ceph.com/resources/downloads/)
S3 Client, typically S3cmd (http://s3tools.org/download)
Python-swiftclient
Kraken dashboard for monitoring (https://github.com/krakendash)
The ceph-dash dashboard for monitoring (https://github.com/Crapworks/ceph-dash)
OpenStack RDO (http://rdo.fedorapeople.org/rdo-release.rpm)
This book targets IT and storage administrators who want to enter into the world of software-defined storage using Ceph. It also targets anyone who wishes to understand how to use Ceph and its workings to start developing and contributing to Ceph open source projects.
This book also provides valuable information for IT managers and professionals trying to understand the difference between traditional and software-defined cloud storage.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The disk zap subcommand will destroy the existing partition table and content from the disk."
A block of code is set as follows:
DEVICE=<correct device name of your second network interface, check ifconfig -a> ONBOOT=yes BOOTPROTO=static IPADDR=192.168.57.102 NETMASK=255.255.255.0 HWADDR= <correct MAC address of your second network interface, check ifconfig -a >
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# ceph status
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You can do this by selecting the ceph-node1 VM from Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager, and then clicking on the Start button."
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