Ceph’s CRUSH algorithm liberates storage clusters from the scalability and performance limitations imposed by centralized data table mapping. It replicates and rebalances data within the cluster dynamically—eliminating this tedious task for administrators, while delivering high-performance and infinite scalability.
The power of Ceph can transform your organization’s IT infrastructure and your ability to manage vast amounts of data. If your organization runs applications with different storage interface needs, Ceph is for you! Ceph’s foundation is the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS), which provides your applications with object, block, and file system storage in a single unified storage cluster—making Ceph flexible, highly reliable and easy for you to manage.
Ceph’s RADOS provides you with extraordinary data storage scalability—thousands of client hosts or KVMs accessing petabytes to exabytes of data. Each one of your applications can use the object, block or file system interfaces to the same RADOS cluster simultaneously, which means your Ceph storage system serves as a flexible foundation for all of your data storage needs. You can use Ceph for free, and deploy it on economical commodity hardware. Ceph is a better way to store data.
By decoupling the namespace from the underlying hardware, object-based storage systems enable you to build much larger storage clusters. You can scale out object-based storage systems using economical commodity hardware, and you can replace hardware easily when it malfunctions or fails.
A brief overview of the Ceph project and what it can do.
Organizations prefer object-based storage when deploying large scale storage systems, because it stores data more efficiently. Object-based storage systems separate the object namespace from the underlying storage hardware—this simplifies data migration.
Ceph’s object storage system isn’t limited to native binding or RESTful APIs. You can mount Ceph as a thinly provisioned block device! When you write data to Ceph using a block device, Ceph automatically stripes and replicates the data across the cluster.
Ceph provides a traditional file system interface with POSIX semantics. Object storage systems are a significant innovation, but they complement rather than replace traditional file systems.
Each one of your applications can use the object, block or file system interfaces to the same RADOS cluster simultaneously, which means your Ceph storage system serves as a flexible foundation for all of your data storage needs.