Ceph Intro & Architectural Overview

Ceph is a free software storage platform designed to present object, block, and file storage from a single distributed computer cluster. Ceph&main goals are to be completely distributed without a single point of failure, scalable to the exabyte level, and freely-available. The data is replicated, making it fault tolerant. Ceph software runs on commodity hardware. The system is designed to be both self-healing and self-managing and strives to reduce both administrator and budget overhead. Ceph employs four distinct kinds of daemons:[4] Cluster monitors (ceph-mon) that keep track of active and failed cluster nodes Metadata servers (ceph-mds) that store the metadata of inodes and directories Object storage devices (ceph-osd) that actually store the content of files. Ideally, OSDs store their data on a local btrfs filesystem to leverage its built-in copy-on-write capabilities, though other local filesystems can be used instead.[5] Representational state transfer (RESTful) gateways (ceph-rgw) that expose the object storage layer as an interface compatible with Amazon S3 or OpenStack Swift APIs All of these are fully distributed, and may run on the same set of servers. Clients directly interact with all of them.[6] Ceph does striping of individual files across multiple nodes to achieve higher throughput, similarly to how RAID0 stripes partitions across multiple hard drives. Adaptive load balancing is supported whereby frequently accessed objects are replicated over more...