CEPH
Meet Ceph : Reliable , scalable , affordable . open source Developed by Weil - in collaboration with data storage researchers at the University of California : Santa Cruz , as well as at researchers from the country ’ s leading laboratories in Los Alamos and beyond - Ceph is a distributed , open source data storage solution that grew to fill that glaring hole in the market Weil and his colleagues saw back in the 2000s .
“ Ceph is designed to provide a reliable storage service out of unreliable components . You take a bunch of individual hard drives that can fail , a bunch of networks that can fail , switches , servers that all individually are very fallible , you put them all together with Ceph and the net result is something that ' s highly reliable that tolerates any single point of failure - or in many cases many points of failure . It ' s highly available and highly scalable as well ,” Weil explains , adding that Ceph is also capable of providing object , block , and file storage all in one system on the same hardware .
Ceph ’ s distributed approach to data storage is hugely fault tolerant . Like a commercial airliner that can continue to fly with all but one engine out of commission , Ceph is robust enough to handle all but the most catastrophic of outages .
As a storage solution , Ceph ’ s appeal also lies in its open source , software defined design that - in addition to delivering reliability and flexibility at scale - excels at adding up to far more than the sum of any somewhat meagre parts you might happen to have lying around . “ Ceph is open source , software defined , and meant to be run on any commodity hardware you want to buy or already have ,” Weil says . “ It doesn ' t matter which vendor you ' re buying your hardware from , whether you ' re using hard drives or SSDs , what kind of switches are in your network ; it ' s fully software defined ,”
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