What is CEPH???

[Raymond Burns]

This is not a question for Proxmox, but I trust the Proxmox forums (moderators can delete if need be).

I read a lot of the benefits of CEPH, and how you can expand and manage it easily, but what exactly is it. I went with ZFS network attached storage because I could understand it. It's software RAID that runs better than hardware RAID. Many other features based on your distro, but it is a single server utilizing Software RAID with backup features including ZFS sends.

What is CEPH?
I read that RAID is not needed, but how do you get a server setup with CEPH without RAID? A single disk? How do you get Proxmox onto a CEPH server without RAID? Seems volatile. But that can't be true because everyone is super excited about Proxmox and CEPH coming together.

 

[tom]

This wiki page tells you all about the integration:
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Ceph_Server

And for info about Ceph in general, take a look on http://ceph.com/ceph-storage/block-storage/

 

[mo_]

ceph is a storage CLUSTERING solution. You can add any number of disks on any number of machines into one big storage cluster. Then you set up the configuration for ceph, most notably the number of copies of a file. If you set this to 2 for instance, it means that the cluster will always have 3 copies of all the objects this setting applies to. Ceph is also self-managing, meaning that it will automatically try to distribute these copies over 3 physical machines (if possible), onto 3 separate disks. When any disk or machine dies, ceph will immediately use the 2 remaining copies of the affected objects and create a 3rd copy in the cluster. What this does is eliminate the requirement to manually restock your spare disk in a conventional RAID setup as long as you have enough total storage to fit all the objects 3 times.

If you have any further questions to this, just ask away