Ceph storage system

37 points by dduvnjak 13 years ago | 17 comments

nasalgoat 13 years ago |

Not sure if much has changed, but the last time I tried to install Ceph it wouldn't work under CentOS. That, and it was far too complicated to set up.

GlusterFS, on the other hand, was incredibly easy, although I am not a fan of FUSE due to the high CPU usage.

fintler 13 years ago | |

I still see Ceph as competition to supercomputer filesystems and not really as competition to GlusterFS. For example, the design of it directly attacks the problem of centralized metadata (especially useful after the DARPA project to bring it to Lustre failed).

I was working on an unrelated project with one of the designers of Ceph (UCSC's Scott Brandt) and in conversation he also seems to concur that Ceph was really built as a replacement for PanFS or Lustre (but still may be useful for other things of course).

Using it to replace GlusterFS still seems odd to me. It feels like they're both solutions to different problems.

noahdesu 13 years ago | | |

Recent gluster vs ceph debate at LCA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfRqpdgoiRQ

noahdesu 13 years ago | |

Platform support (http://ceph.com/docs/master/install/os-recommendations/#plat...) and deployment tools have come a long way. In the past setup has been complicated (Ceph is inherently more complex than other systems), but it is getting much easier. There is also extensive documentation at http//ceph.com/docs, as well as very active IRC channel and mailing lists for support.

Ceph is much larger than just the file system (as the article points out). And while many Ceph products/subsystems are used extensively in production environments (RBD block store, RGW, and RADOS), CephFS isn't officially supported as production-ready.

Despite that, we run Hadoop on top of CephFS, and can deal with the occasional metadata server problem. CephFS is actively being hardened.

komljen 13 years ago | | |

Correct, Ceph is much larger than the file system. As I said at beginning of article I'm using each Ceph component, RBD, RadosGW and CephFS and I will write article for each of that. This is just some sort of getting started guide. I'm interested at running Hadoop on top of CephFS, is it stable enough?

Nux 13 years ago | |

Ceph has a yum repo for Centos, although Cephfs still does not work (maybe it will be backported to the "ancient" EL6 kernel someday). You can use the fuse client instead.

Configuration-wise, Ceph involves quite a bit of voodoo compared to Glusterfs, it's an area where I hope to see some improvement.

tssva 13 years ago | | |

Is the metadata server still a single point of failure?

giulivo 13 years ago | |

One more feature I found very interesting in GlusterFS is the ability to export the volumes via NFS, transparently, to the NFS clients.

yaksha 13 years ago |

FLOSS Weekly recently interviewed the Ceph project. Link to the show: http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/250

mad44 13 years ago |

Here is a summary of how Ceph works. http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2011/03/ceph-scalable-high-...

noahdesu 13 years ago | |

Inktank is the professional services company backing Ceph. Here is their youtube channel with a whole lot of up-to-date videos:

http://www.youtube.com/user/inktankstorage

jmspring 13 years ago | | |

Glad to see Sage commercializing this and happy to see research activities from UC Santa Cruz's (where I went for grad/undergrad) Storage Systems Research Center making it into commercial use.

More SSRC work and some of the original CEPH papers can be found at:

http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/index.html

bwb 13 years ago |

The guys behind Ceph are very smart, I'd keep an eye on this one as it's going to be awesome!