With the ever rising need of the storage solution to manage the business critical data with any type of hosting, is the need of an hour today. With the ever-growing cloud technology, the penetration of open source software and storage system is quite visible. Underlining this principle of high-performance storage to support the fast computing speed, Ceph Storage servers the utility, here we are to learn about the Ceph Storage as a solution to these problems.
What is Ceph Storage?
Ceph is an open source software to facilitate storage of highly scalable object, files and rich media as a whole system together. The clusters of Ceph are designed in a way to run the commodity hardware with the help of an algorithm called as CRUSH (Controlled Replication Under Scalable Hashing). This algorithm makes sure that all the data is harmoniously distributed across the cluster and all the nodes of the cluster can retrieve the data without any constraints.
In general, Ceph can be explained as – supposedly you have an extensive data that can be stored in clusters and the corresponding sub clusters. Each sub-cluster also has the information of the root cluster, such that it can root the right information to the right lineage. Enter CRUSH, a scalable hashing algorithm which helps you divide the data into the right cluster and sub cluster, thus making the data retrieval quite easy and simplified. Therefore Ceph Storage is a great way of large data organization and simplified access.
Features of Ceph Storage
As the data rate grows exponentially today, the organization needs an affordable and scalable solution to store the large voluminous data. Here are some of the salient features of Ceph Storage.
- Ceph backup every IT infrastructure: A new ear of software-defined storage solutions are in practice when it comes to storing or archiving the large volume of data. One of the prime reason for the legacy infrastructure not able to meet the needs is the cost. Also, the cloud technology is in the prime adoption rate by the most of the IT organizations, providing the solution to be the best fit.
- Ceph provides dynamic storage clusters: As the traditional storage application do not make the most of the CPU and RAM available, but Ceph do so. From balancing the cluster to recovering from errors and faults, Ceph offloads work from clients by using the distributed computing power of Ceph object storage daemons to perform the required work.
- Scalable, reliable and secure to manage: Ceph gives the flexibility to scale without affecting the capital expenditure and operating expenditure. A Ceph node leverages hardware capabilities with Ceph Storage Clusters which replicate and redistribute the data dynamically. Managing the clusters and sub clusters is also very easy and simplified.
Benefits of Ceph Storage
Being a Software-defined storage solution, Ceph provides flexibility in hardware selection as well making it most famous among web professionals. Ceph offers the following advantages:
- Data Safety: It has a feature of making the data update visible to clients. Also, it lets users know that the updated data is replicated on a disk in case of power failure. Ceph also realizes low-latency updates for app synchronization and data safety semantics.
- Failure detection: Ceph helps in spotting the errors or failures at the right time while securing the data. The OSD(Object Storage Daemons) can report these errors and failures.
- Recovery and Updates: In case if any of the OSD failures, OSD cluster maps change. In a bid to provide fast recovery, OSD maintains a version of each object along with the logs of changes.
- Data Distribution & replication: Ceph adopts a strategy when it comes to distributing data. Ceph helps in mapping objects into placement group using the hash function. These placement groups are then assisted to OSDs using CRUSH algorithm to store the replicas of the object which is different from the traditional approach.
Ceph as a whole possesses to be a solution for the three crucial challenges which organization faces when it comes to storage which is – scalability, reliability, and performance. It is also useful in securing your cloud storage.
