Configuring options for one-stop shopping

Corporate procurement systems can be, well, corporate. Your organization might allow you to only select only from a set menu of pre-configured systems, which may even be years obsolete. Perhaps the purchasing people get a deal on a certain product line and resist ordering from others that may be better suited to your Ceph aspirations. Say only a 12-bay LFF server is offered, but your IOPS needs favor a 25-bay SFF server. Or only configurations with a single 300 GB disk are offered, as a legacy of a proprietary SAN or NAS strategy. Perhaps your warehouse is full of expensive high-speed 24-core overkill servers with only four disk bays, or 1.2 GHz 4-core weaklings. Or you are charged for a bay-robbing optical drive that you have no use for.

In some cases, you might be able to order a bare-bones system and additional line items to grow it to your needs, but beware of significant compromises that can hinder the success, capacity, and stability of your Ceph clusters.