14–18 Oct 2013
Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage
Europe/Amsterdam timezone

Building an organic block storage service at CERN with Ceph

14 Oct 2013, 15:45
20m
Administratiezaal (Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage)

Administratiezaal

Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage

Oral presentation to parallel session Data Stores, Data Bases, and Storage Systems Data Stores, Data Bases, and Storage Systems

Speaker

Dr Daniel van der Ster (CERN)

Description

Emerging storage requirements, such as the need for block storage for both OpenStack VMs and file services like AFS and NFS, have motivated the development of a generic backend storage service for CERN IT. The goals for such a service include (a) vendor neutrality, (b) horizontal scalability with commodity hardware, (c) fault tolerance at the disk, host, and network levels, and (d) support for geo-replication. Ceph is an attractive option due to its native block device layer RBD which is built upon its scalable, reliable, and performant object storage system, RADOS. It can be considered an "organic" storage solution because of its ability to balance and heal itself while living on an ever-changing set of heterogeneous disk servers. This work will present the outcome of a petabyte-scale test deployment of Ceph by CERN IT. We will first present the architecture and configuration of our cluster, including a summary of best practices learned from the community and discovered internally. Next the results of various functionality and performance tests will be shown: the cluster has been used as a backend block storage system for AFS and NFS servers as well as a many-thousand node OpenStack cluster at CERN. Finally, we will discuss the next steps and future possibilities for Ceph at CERN.

Primary authors

Presentation materials