Ceph storage system (opens in new tab)

I still see Ceph as competition to supercomputer filesystems and not really as competition to GlusterFS. For example, the design of it directly attacks the problem of centralized metadata (especially useful after the DARPA project to bring it to Lustre failed).

I was working on an unrelated project with one of the designers of Ceph (UCSC's Scott Brandt) and in conversation he also seems to concur that Ceph was really built as a replacement for PanFS or Lustre (but still may be useful for other things of course).

Using it to replace GlusterFS still seems odd to me. It feels like they're both solutions to different problems.

Platform support (http://ceph.com/docs/master/install/os-recommendations/#plat...) and deployment tools have come a long way. In the past setup has been complicated (Ceph is inherently more complex than other systems), but it is getting much easier. There is also extensive documentation at http//ceph.com/docs, as well as very active IRC channel and mailing lists for support.

Ceph is much larger than just the file system (as the article points out). And while many Ceph products/subsystems are used extensively in production environments (RBD block store, RGW, and RADOS), CephFS isn't officially supported as production-ready.

Despite that, we run Hadoop on top of CephFS, and can deal with the occasional metadata server problem. CephFS is actively being hardened.

Ceph has a yum repo for Centos, although Cephfs still does not work (maybe it will be backported to the "ancient" EL6 kernel someday). You can use the fuse client instead.

Configuration-wise, Ceph involves quite a bit of voodoo compared to Glusterfs, it's an area where I hope to see some improvement.

One more feature I found very interesting in GlusterFS is the ability to export the volumes via NFS, transparently, to the NFS clients.

Inktank is the professional services company backing Ceph. Here is their youtube channel with a whole lot of up-to-date videos:

http://www.youtube.com/user/inktankstorage