Abstract
As the size and performance requirements of storage systems have increased, file system designers have looked to new architectures to facilitate system scalability. Ceph is a fully open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability from terabytes to exabytes.
Ceph utilizes a novel pseudo-random placement algorithm (CRUSH), active storage nodes, and peer-to-peer like gossip protocols to avoid the scalability and reliability problems associated with central lookup tables or gateway servers. Ceph's architecture is based on an object storage service that provides a generic, scalable storage platform with support for snapshots and distributed computation. This architecture allows much better scaling behavior than file-based distributed systems whose designs are constrained by legacy protocols like NFS.
This talk will discuss the distributed object storage layer, and ways in which it can be leveraged for cloud applications. We will also discuss the POSIX distributed file system built on top of the object storage cluster, and how it achieves massive scales by rethinking the conventional client/server model.
Learning Objectives
How the distributed object storage cluster operates at scale.
Why a rich object API is more useful than a traditional file API.
How cluster-coherent POSIX file access scales to exabytes.