Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

The editor will share with you what Ceph means. I hope you will get something after reading this article. Let's discuss it together.

2.1What is Ceph?

Ceph's official website Ceph.com defines Ceph succinctly with the following sentence:

"Ceph is a unified, distributed storage system designed for excellent performance, reliability and scalability."

In other words, Ceph is a unified, distributed storage system designed for excellent performance, reliability and scalability. It should be said that this sentence does point out the essence of Ceph and can be used as a basic starting point for understanding the design idea and implementation mechanism of Ceph system. In this definition, special attention should be paid to the two modifiers of the concept of "storage system", namely "unified" and "distributed".

Specifically, "unified" means that Ceph can provide three functions of object storage, block storage and file system storage at the same time, so as to simplify deployment and operation and maintenance while meeting the needs of different applications. On the other hand, "distributed" in Ceph system means real non-central structure and system scale scalability without theoretical upper limit. In practice, Ceph can be deployed on thousands of servers. As of early March 2013, the largest system deployed by Ceph in the production environment is Dreamhost's object storage business cluster, which manages physical storage capacity of 3PB [1].

2.2 Why care about Ceph?

In fact, Ceph is not a fledgling open source project. In contrast, Ceph has come a long way for more than seven years from its initial release to its popularity. The author thinks that there are two reasons why we should understand Ceph.

First of all, Ceph itself does have more outstanding advantages.

Ceph has many advantages worth mentioning, including unified storage capacity, scalability, reliability, performance, automated maintenance, and so on. In essence, these advantages of Ceph come from its advanced core design ideas, which can be summarized into eight words-"No need to look up the table, just do the math". Based on this design idea, Ceph gives full play to the computing power of the storage device itself, while eliminating the dependence on a single central node of the system, thus realizing a real non-central structure. Based on this design idea and structure, Ceph achieves high reliability and scalability on the one hand, and ensures relatively low latency and high aggregate bandwidth of client access on the other hand. Through the introduction of the follow-up content, readers can see that the implementation of almost all the excellent features of Ceph is related to this core design idea.

Second, Ceph is currently highly valued in the OpenStack community.

OpenStack is the most popular open source cloud operating system. According to the author's observation, the reason why the fever of Ceph has soared in the past year or two, the most powerful driving factor is the actual demand of the OpenStack community. At present, Ceph has become one of the most popular open source storage solutions in the OpenStack community. Its practical applications are mainly related to block storage and object storage, and begin to expand to the field of file system. The relevant information of this part will also be introduced in the following articles.

2.3 the emergence and development of Ceph

Generally speaking, open source projects come from three sources: first, projects written by Daniel in the school, where enough papers are published and then open source; second, products made by Daniel in the enterprise, so open source by chance; third, some Daniel suddenly appears, and then a bunch of people open source together. There are many examples of each category, and open source projects of different origins have their own different characteristics. Specifically, the principle and technology of the first category of projects are likely to be unique, and Ceph is one of them. By contrast, the design and implementation of the second type of project is likely to be mature and have the opportunity to actually deploy applications in a production environment before or at the initial stage of open source. This background factor is likely to have an impact on the follow-up development of an open source project.

Let's get back to the point. The Ceph program originated from a research project conducted by its founder Sage Weil during his PhD program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The start time of the project is 2004 [2]. At the 2006 OSDI academic conference, Sage published a paper introducing Ceph [3] and provided a download link to the Ceph project at the end of the paper. As a result, Ceph began to be widely known.

Ceph is developed in the C++ language. For a typical system project that emphasizes performance, this choice is understandable.

As an open source project, Ceph follows the LGPL protocol.

According to the information on Inktank's official website [4], Cpeh's ecosystem participates in the following figure:

It is not difficult to see that the vendors or organizations listed in the figure have a clear flavor of cloud computing.

With the increasing popularity of Ceph, Sage Weil founded Inktank in 2011 to lead Ceph development and community maintenance. Currently, the release cycle of Ceph is three months.

After reading this article, I believe you have a certain understanding of "what does Ceph mean?" if you want to know more about it, you are welcome to follow the industry information channel. Thank you for your reading!

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