Ceph as the cloud storage solution

One of the most problematic yet crucial components of cloud infrastructure development is storage. A cloud environment needs storage that can scale up and out at low cost and that integrates well with other components. Such a storage system is a key contributor to the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the entire cloud platform. There are traditional storage vendors who claim to provide integration to cloud frameworks, but we need additional features beyond just integration support. Traditional storage solutions may have proven adequate in the past, but today they are not ideal candidates for a unified cloud storage solution. Traditional storage systems are expensive to deploy and support in the long term, and scaling up and out is uncharted territory. We need a storage solution designed to fulfill current and future needs, a system built upon open source software and commodity hardware that can provide the required scalability in a cost-effective way.

Ceph has rapidly evolved in this space to fill the need for a true cloud storage backend. It is favored by major open source cloud platforms including as OpenStack, CloudStack, and OpenNebula. Ceph has built partnerships with Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE, the giants in Linux space who favor distributed, reliable, and scalable Ceph storage clusters for their Linux and cloud software distributions. The Ceph community is working closely with these Linux giants to provide a reliable multi-featured storage backend for their cloud platforms.

Public and private clouds have gained momentum with to the OpenStack platform. OpenStack has proven itself as an end-to-end cloud solution. It includes two core storage components: Swift, which provides object-based storage, and Cinder, which provides block storage volumes to instances. Ceph excels as the back end for both object and block storage in OpenStack deployments.

Swift is limited to object storage. Ceph is a unified storage solution for block, file, and object storage and benefits OpenStack deployments by serving multiple storage modalities from a single backend cluster. The OpenStack and Ceph communities have worked together for many years to develop a fully supported Ceph storage backend for the OpenStack cloud. From OpenStack's Folsom release Ceph has been fully integrated. Ceph's developers ensure that Ceph works well with each new release of OpenStack, contributing new features and bug fixes. OpenStack's Cinder and Glance components utilize Ceph's key RADOS Block Device (RBD) service. Ceph RBD enables OpenStack deployments to rapidly provision of hundreds of virtual machine instances by providing thin-provisioned snapshot and cloned volumes that are quickly and efficiently created.

Cloud platforms with Ceph as a storage backend provide much needed flexibility to service providers who build Storage as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions that they cannot realize with traditional enterprise storage solutions. By leveraging Ceph as a backend for cloud platforms, service providers can offer low-cost cloud services to their customers. Ceph enables them to offer relatively low storage prices with enterprise features when compared to other storage solutions.

Dell, SUSE, Redhat, and Canonical offer and support deployment and configuration management tools such as Dell Crowbar, Red Hat's Ansible, and Juju for automated and easy deployment of Ceph storage for their OpenStack cloud solutions. Other configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack are popular for automated Ceph deployment. Each of these tools has open source, ready made Ceph modules available that can be easily leveraged for Ceph deployment. With Red Hat's acquisition of Ansible the open source ceph-ansible suite is becoming a favored deployment and management tool. In distributed cloud (and other) environments, every component must scale. These configuration management tools are essential to quickly scale up your infrastructure. Ceph is fully compatible with these tools, allowing customers to deploy and extend a Ceph cluster instantly.