Ceph - The future of the storage
Ceph first thoughts
I've been working/playing with Storage systems since almost 4 years now, it's been a journey understand how things works on this side, I'm a Netapp certified engineer on SAN environments now and personally speaking it was not hard to understand the Netapp world because my background is based in Linux and working with the cli is a day to day task, so my friend Reynaldo Pineda introduced me few storage concepts and useful commands for a week and the next week I was totally by my own supporting a production environment, at the end I could blame my manager if something went wrong to put an unexperienced guy behind the controls... :) But fortunately nothing happened, well played, weeeell played.
Going back to my journey on storage, I learnt a lot, and I was able to manage the "black box" for the sysadmins,
with more experience gained I faced ugly problems that cost me valuable time with family, celebrations, weekends, hollydays, and nights a lot of nights, but finally I got the point when I can do things easily, and my level of understanding how things works no matter the infraestructure was getting better.
But this is the point when you are a curious guy and you like to know what else is out there, well, I'm surprised how technology advance minute to minute , it's a progressive and infinite science, .... I took a deep dive on SAN and Netapp Storage systems and when I looked back, the technology world surprisly changed, to be more specific on OpenSource Projects and Cloud.
Doing a bit of research I found a pretty darn interesting project called "CEPH" , it really blew my mind.
I was looking for an inexpensive storage solution for an "small" private cloud, and basically we found in Ceph everything that we needed, it's a distributed storage system, and it's OpenSource!, they claim to have a really good performance, reliability and scalability and indeed they have it all.
Ceph supports Object and Block storage, is integrated now on the Linux kernel, and the best thing, OpenStack included Ceph as well, Ceph also has its own filesystem (no yet ready for prod environments).
We just deployed Ceph on a test environment and things seems to be really interesting, and functional, Still working on getting more experience with that, and I'll start posting some more specific facts about it.
I see a huge potential here for companies who wants to build an inexpensive private clouds with all the privileges of performance, high availability and scalability that other technology leaders can offer, such as EMC, NetApp, IBM...
That's why Redhat stepped out first and buy Inktank, (the company who leads Sage Weil , Ceph autor)
I believe is the next big thing on Storage and cloud solutions.
References:
Ceph main site : https://ceph.com/
Hardware recomendations to run ceph: https://ceph.com/docs/master/start/hardware-recommendations/
