What is Ceph?

last time we talked about software defined storage an alternative to traditional proprietary storage appliances there are pros and cons with both approaches but if you chose to go the sds way what sds software to use ceph seems to be the benchmark software for many let's take a look [Music] why hi there my name is marcus i'm an enterprise it enthusiast and in here we talk everything about enterprise it from bare metal to cloud native if you like the video hit like and if you haven't yet consider subscribing i am proud to continue this mini series about sds with our sponsor softbyron thank you so you've decided to go for software defined storage probably for its flexibility and scalability and perhaps a little bit for its lower costs too but there are quite a few sts solutions out there like ceph cluster fs bgfs mini io cloudian scality so what to choose a few crucial features are typically more important for enterprise customers than others one is reliability and not only the reliability of the actual solution but the company you need to be able to trust that the solution you choose will continue to exist and be supported in the foreseeable future talking about support comprehensive enterprise grade support is essential with critical environments and of course the solution itself needs to be speedy and fitty enough some of the more proprietary sds solutions like claudia and scality include support by default if you choose to go for open source sds be sure that enterprise create support is available for example red hat offers support for ceph even though being 100 open source and the global cell community is big and growing fast ceph also packs a very impressive feature set these are some of the reasons why more and more people consider ceph being the leading open source sds solution today let me give you a quick high-level overview of seth let's start with three components a comedy server x86 or arm linux and ceph what you now have is a saf node you can leave it there and start running saf technically but of course if you want proper performance and high availability you should have a bunch of nodes let's have five for now when you combine multiple ceph nodes you'll create a cef cluster and this is the first cool thing about ceph a cluster can virtually scale infinitely large networking will become a headache at some point but still there's no hard upper limit for a cluster size ceph is an object store at its heart but what's awesome is that you can provision object block and file stores from the same ceph cluster gone are the days of building and maintaining a number of different storage stacks for all your different applications all data is distributed between the drives and nodes in the cluster and an innovative algorithm called crush is used to algorithmically store and locate the data in a cluster reducing overhead lastly ceph is using erasure coding instead of raid which makes recovering from drive failures quite a lot faster super important these days when drive sizes are growing fast now here's the catch ceph is not the easiest to set up and maintain it takes quite a lot of expertise to install and configure the software part not to talk about optimizing hardware for best performance and availability for setting up the networking which is maybe the most critical part of ceph what comes to performance running and troubleshooting vanilla sf using multiple user interfaces and support entities is not straightforward at all this is not what companies want to hear these days they are rather moving away from siloed specialists to id generalists everything needs to be simple that's what public cloud has taught all of us this is where soft iron steps in soft iron's hybrid drive is built around the same open source sap that you can download for free online but instead of you needing to figure out the optimal linux distro hardware and networking soft iron has everything figured out for you soft iron provides you an appliance experience saf is running on soft iron's own linux and optimized low-power arm-based hardware there's only one management user interface and one support number to call because soft iron designs and builds their own hardware they have a few bonuses up their sleeves for instance asif button when pressed it tells seth that a specific drive is about to be replaced and runs all the necessary operations for you can also be done with sev command line tools if you have the tech skills oh one more thing even though soft iron provides you an appliance experience it is still built around the standard open source ceph which means you are free to switch to any other cf platform at any time if you feel that soft iron is not a fit for you anymore build your own or just let somebody else take it from there quite liberating huh that's all from me this time thanks for watching and remember to like and subscribe until the next time

Channel: Markus Leinonen

Views: 15,234

Rating: 4.6551723 out of 5

Keywords: sds, software-defined, storage, storage array, SoftIron, SoftIron HyperDrive, Ceph, software-defined storage, software-defined datacenter, SDDC, enterprise storage, primary storage, object storage, block storage, file storage

Id: _zBnR-PIGgQ

Length: 5min 44sec (344 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020