Introduction

Ceph is currently the hottest software-defined storage (SDS) technology and is shaking up the entire storage industry. It is an open source project that provides unified software-defined solutions for block, file, and object storage. The core idea of Ceph is to provide a distributed storage system that is massively scalable and high performing with no single point of failure. From the roots, it has been designed to be highly scalable (up to the exabyte level and beyond) while running on general-purpose commodity hardware.

Ceph is acquiring most of the traction in the storage industry due to its open, scalable, and reliable nature. This is the era of cloud computing and software-defined infrastructure, where we need a storage backend that is purely software-defined and, more importantly, cloud-ready. Ceph fits in here very well, regardless of whether you are running a public, private, or hybrid cloud.

Today's software systems are very smart and make the best use of commodity hardware to run gigantic-scale infrastructures. Ceph is one of them; it intelligently uses commodity hardware to provide enterprise-grade robust and highly reliable storage systems.

Ceph has been raised and nourished with the help of the Ceph upstream community with an architectural philosophy that includes the following:

• Every component must scale linearly
• There should not be any single point of failure
• The solution must be software-based, open source, and adaptable
• The Ceph software should run on readily available commodity hardware
• Every component must be self-managing and self-healing wherever possible

The foundation of Ceph lies in objects, which are its building blocks. Object storage such as Ceph is the perfect provision for current and future needs for unstructured data storage. Object storage has its advantages over traditional storage solutions; we can achieve platform and hardware independence using object storage. Ceph plays meticulously with objects and replicates them across the cluster to avail reliability; in Ceph, objects are not tied to a physical path, making object location independent. This flexibility enables Ceph to scale linearly from the petabyte to the exabyte level.

Ceph provides great performance, enormous scalability, power, and flexibility to organizations. It helps them get rid of expensive proprietary storage silos. Ceph is indeed an enterprise-class storage solution that runs on commodity hardware; it is a low-cost yet feature-rich storage system. Ceph's universal storage system provides block, file, and object storage under one hood, enabling customers to use storage as they want.

In the following section we will learn about Ceph releases.

Ceph is being developed and improved at a rapid pace. On July 3, 2012, Sage announced the first LTS release of Ceph with the code name Argonaut. Since then, we have seen 12 new releases come up. Ceph releases are categorized as Long Term Support (LTS), and stable releases and every alternate Ceph release are LTS releases. For more information, visit https://Ceph.com/category/releases/.