More Services, More Space, Less Downtime?
Anyone operating IT services for companies or organisations will sooner or later be confronted with this: everything is growing, you need more space for data and virtual machines, at the same time the demands for the availability of services are increasing and the hardware servers also need to be maintained.
Classic solutions for available storage such as NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network) systems are often expensive and just as often proprietary – and therefore not necessarily the basis you want to build your own IT infrastructure on as part of an open source strategy.
Ceph and the Benefits of Distributed Storage Solutions
For some years now, Ceph has been a solution that can more than meet the above-mentioned requirements and at the same time is an open source project. Ceph is a distributed storage solution that can distribute data in a so-called object storage to any number of server systems and store them redundantly. The server systems are operated with a Linux Distribution on which the Ceph components are installed. The required hardware can consist of commodity server systems.
This allows the operators to equip their preferred hardware models according to their own requirements and to simply add further servers to the Ceph cluster later in operation if needed. Communication between the Ceph nodes takes place via a regular TCP/IP network and also requires no special connections or cabling. In a direct comparison, this is often not only cheaper than purchasing and operating NAS or SAN-systems, but also much more flexible.
