Deploying Ceph with High Performance Networks, Architectures and Benchmarks for Block Storage Solutions

As data continues to grow exponentially storing today’s data volumes in an efficient way is a challenge. Many traditional storage solutions neither scale-out nor make it feasible from Capex and Opex perspective, to deploy Peta-Byte or Exa-Byte data stores. A novel approach is required to manage present-day data volumes and provide users with reasonable access time at a manageable cost.

This paper summarizes the installation and performance benchmarks of a Ceph storage solution. Ceph is a massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage solution, which uniquely provides object, block and file system services with a single, unified Ceph Storage Cluster. The testing emphasizes the careful network architecture design necessary to handle users’ data throughput and transaction requirements. Benchmarks show that a single user can generate read throughput requirements able to saturate a 10Gbps Ethernet network, while the write performance is largely determined by the cluster’s media (Hard Drives and Solid State Drives) capabilities. For even a modestly sized Ceph deployment, the usage of a 40Gbps Ethernet network as the cluster network (“backend”) is imperative to maintain a performing cluster.

Learning Objectives

Challenges of big data storage
Ceph as an open source storage solution
Network requirements for large-scale Ceph deployments
Using 40GbE to increase Ceph performance
Benchmark test results