Ceph compared to other storage solutions

The enterprise storage market is experiencing a fundamental realignment. Traditional proprietary storage systems are incapable of meeting future data storage needs, especially within a reasonable budget. Appliance-based storage is declining even as data usage grows by leaps and bounds.

The high TCO of proprietary systems does not end with hardware procurement: nickle-and-dime feature licenses, yearly support, and management add up to a breathtakingly expensive bottom line. One would previously purchase a pallet-load of hardware, pay for a few years of support, then find that the initial deployment has been EOL'd and thus can't be expanded or even maintained. This perpetuates a cycle of successive rounds of en-masse hardware acquisition. Concomitant support contracts to receive bug fixes and security updates often come at spiraling cost. After a few years (or even sooner) your once-snazzy solution becomes unsupported scrap metal, and the cycle repeats. Pay, rinse, lather, repeat. When the time comes to add a second deployment, the same product line may not even be available, forcing you to implement, document, and support a growing number of incompatible, one-off solutions. I daresay your organization's money and your time can be better spent elsewhere, like giving you a well-deserved raise.

With Ceph new software releases are always available, no licenses expire, and you're welcome to read the code yourself and even contribute. You can also expand your solution along many axes, compatibly and without disruption. Unlike one-size-fits-none proprietary solutions, you can pick exactly the scale, speed, and components that make sense today while effortlessly growing tomorrow, with the highest levels of control and customization.

Open source storage technologies however have demonstrated performance, reliability, scalability, and lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) without fear of product line or model phase-outs or vendor lock-in. Many corporations as well as government, universities, research, healthcare, and HPC (High Performance Computing) organizations are already successfully exploiting open source storage solutions.

Ceph is garnering tremendous interest and gaining popularity, increasingly winning over other open source as well as proprietary storage solutions. In the remainder of this chapter we'll compare Ceph to other open source storage solutions.