The RADOS object store and Ceph filesystem

Object of Desire

Article from ADMIN 09/2012

By Martin Loschwitz

Scalable storage is a key component in cloud environments. RADOS and Ceph enter the field, promising to support seamlessly scalable storage.

Cloud computing is, without a doubt, the IT topic of our time. No issue pushes infrastructure managers with large-scale enterprises as hard as how to best implement the cloud. The IaaS principle is quite simple: The goal is to provide capacity to users in the form of computational power and storage in a way that means as little work as possible for the user and that keeps the entire platform as flexible as possible.

Put more tangibly, this means customers can request CPU cycles and disk space as they see fit and continue to use both as the corresponding services are needed. For IT service providers, this means defining your own setup to be as scalable as possible. It should be possible to accommodate peak loads without difficulty, and if the platform grows – which will be the objective of practically any enterprise – a permanent extension should be accomplished easily.

In practical terms, implementing this kind of solution tends to be more complex. Scalable virtualization environments are something that is easy to achieve: Xen and KVM, in combination with the current crop of management tools, make it easy to manage virtualization hosts. Scale out also is no longer an issue: If the platform needs more computational performance, you can add more machines that integrate seamlessly with the existing infrastructure.

Things start to become more interesting when you look at storage. The way IT environments store data has remained virtually unchanged in the past few years.

In the early 1990s, data centers comprised many servers with local storage, all of which suffered from legacy single points of failure. As of the mid-1990s, Fibre Channel HBAs and matching SAN storage entered the scene, offering far more redundancy than their predecessors, but at a far higher price. People who preferred a lower budget approach turned to DRBD with standard hardware a few years ago, thus avoiding what can be hugely expensive SANs. However, all of these

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