Speaker
Mr
Andreas Joachim Peters
(CERN)
Description
In 2013, CERN IT evaluated then deployed a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster to support OpenStack use-cases in production. As of fall 2014, this cluster stores around 300 TB of data comprising more than a thousand VM images and a similar number of block device volumes. With more than a year of smooth operations, we will present our experience and tuning best-practices.
Beyond the cloud storage use-cases, we have been exploring Ceph-based services to satisfy the growing storage requirements during and after Run2. First, we have developed a Ceph back-end for CASTOR, allowing this service to deploy thin disk server nodes which act as gateways to Ceph; this feature marries the strong data archival and cataloging features of CASTOR with the resilient and performant Ceph subsystem for disk. Second, we have developed RADOSFS, a lightweight storage API which builds a POSIX-like filesystem on top of the Ceph object layer. When combined with Xrootd, RADOSFS can offer a scalable object interface compatible with our HEP data processing applications. Lastly the same object layer is being used to build a scalable and inexpensive NFS service for several user communities.
Author
Dan van der Ster
(CERN)
