Introduction

Ceph is currently the hottest Software Defined Storage (SDS) technology that is shaking up the entire storage industry. It is an open source project that provides unified software defined solutions for Block, File, and Object storage. The core idea of Ceph is to provide a distributed storage system that is massively scalable and high performing with no single point of failure. From the roots, it has been designed to be highly scalable (up to the exabyte level and beyond) while running on general-purpose commodity hardware.

Ceph is acquiring most of the traction in the storage industry due to its open, scalable, and reliable nature. This is the era of cloud computing and software defined infrastructure, where we need a storage backend that is purely software defined, and more importantly, cloud ready. Ceph fits in here very well, regardless of whether you are running a public, private, or hybrid cloud.

Today's software systems are very smart and make the best use of commodity hardware to run gigantic scale infrastructure. Ceph is one of them; it intelligently uses commodity hardware to provide enterprise-grade robust and highly reliable storage systems.

Ceph has been raised and nourished with an architectural philosophy that includes the following:

• Every component must scale linearly
• There should not be any single point of failure
• The solution must be software-based, open source, and adaptable
• Ceph software should run on readily available commodity hardware
• Every component must be self-managing and self-healing wherever possible

The foundation of Ceph lies in the objects, which are its building blocks, and object storage like Ceph is the perfect provision for the current and future needs for unstructured data storage. Object storage has its advantages over traditional storage solutions; we can achieve platform and hardware independence using object storage. Ceph plays meticulously with objects and replicates them across the cluster to avail reliability; in Ceph, objects are not tied to a physical path, making object location independent. Such flexibility enables Ceph to scale linearly from the petabyte to exabyte level.

Ceph provides great performance, enormous scalability, power, and flexibility to organizations. It helps them get rid of expensive proprietary storage silos. Ceph is indeed an enterprise class storage solution that runs on commodity hardware; it is a low-cost yet feature rich storage system. The Ceph universal storage system provides Block, File, and Object storage under one hood, enabling customers to use storage as they want.

Ceph Releases

Ceph is being developed and improved at a rapid pace. On July 3, 2012, Sage announced the first LTS release of Ceph with the code name, Argonaut. Since then, we have seen seven new releases come up. Ceph releases are categorized as LTS (Long Term Support), and development releases and every alternate Ceph release is an LTS release. For more information, please visit https://Ceph.com/category/releases/.

Tip

Here is a fact: Ceph release names follow alphabetic order; the next one will be a "K" release.

Note

The term "Ceph" is a common nickname given to pet octopuses and is considered a short form of "Cephalopod", which is a class of marine animals that belong to the mollusk phylum. Ceph has octopuses as its mascot, which represents Ceph's highly parallel behavior, similar to octopuses.