Secret Tips for Cloud Economy: How to Store the Data and Save Costs
The storage solution market is constantly growing and the players are consistently increasing their product offerings. It’s so easy to get lost in the myriads of storage systems. Which one is right for your company model, business area and location?! Some of them are well-known and proven by time; others are ultra-new, promising ultra-efficient results. Based on our cloud management experience Sardina Systems can share the tips to choose the proper storage solution and not regret it.
Ceph — proven by time and workload
Storage has always been a topic of high interest in the IT community. With the advent of virtualization, the storage sector has evolved into software-defined storage, which offers several advantages compared to traditional storage solutions: scalability, cost-effectiveness, security, recovery in case of disaster.
At Sardina, we work with leading open source technologies like OpenStack and Kubernetes. In most cases, we advise our customers to choose Ceph storage as the best solution for the private cloud. Let’s see what benefits it has to offer.
Ceph is an open-source block, object and file storage solution that uses its very own file system (CephFS). Ceph provides enterprises with highly scalable storage while keeping CapEx and Op costs low. It has an essential functional feature to distribute the load and provide the best possible performance even from low configured hardware. The data can be physically secured in various storage areas. In addition, Ceph guarantees a wide variety of storage devices from which to choose.
How does it work?
On the whole, Ceph functioning as a storage system is quite simple. Ceph requires several computers to be connected, forming a cluster. Each connected computer is called a node, and each node performs a different task:
- Monitor: maintains a master copy of the cluster map. It ensures high availability in the case a daemon fails;
- Manager: manages the level of used space, is responsible for orchestration and plug-in modules;
- Ceph OSDs: in charge of managing the files: storing, duplicating and restoring data;
- Ceph MDS stores file metadata saved in CephFS is used to provide file services.
The key component of Ceph is CRUSH, an algorithm that is able to find an OSD with a requested file. CRUSH calculates the most suitable place to store data based on criteria defined by the network administrator. Doing so also duplicates files and stores them on separate physical media.
It is based on RADOS — a scalable, reliable storage service for petabyte-scale storage clusters, composed of intelligent storage nodes that regenerate themselves and self-organize. Saved files can be accessed using different methods: librados, radosgw, CephFS, Rados Block Device.
The main advantage of Ceph is that it provides interfaces for multiple storage types within a single cluster, eliminating the need for numerous vendor storage solutions and specialized hardware. Use cases of Ceph vary from cloud infrastructure and hyper-converged infrastructure to big data analytics and rich media.
Ceph also stands out among other storage solutions because it makes working with OpenStack and Kubernetes easier. Ceph can be integrated with all of OpenStack’s major storage-related projects: OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder), OpenStack Image service (Glance), and OpenStack File Share service (Manila). In addition, Ceph Storage can be a drop-in replacement for OpenStack Object Storage (Swift).
Additional Perks of Ceph
Installation and operation simplicity. Switching to software-defined storage platforms is not always easy. However, Ceph solves this problem by allowing block and object storage combinations in the same cluster. There is no worry about administering separated storage services using other APIs or tech. Besides, Ceph Storage has a massively distributed architecture that allows easy and tight integration with broader OpenStack and Kubernetes infrastructure. Ceph’s operability enables it to configure storage more efficiently.
Price advantage. Ceph can significantly reduce the cost of data storage, lower CapEx by running on commodity server hardware and OpEx due to its self-managing and self-healing properties.
Versatility. Ceph perfectly works for companies of all sizes and business spheres. It can grow with the workload, expand or shrink accordingly to your current needs.
Scalability. Ceph delivers extraordinary scalability. A Ceph Node leverages commodity hardware and intelligent daemons, and a Ceph Storage Cluster accommodates large numbers of nodes, which communicate with each other to replicate and redistribute data dynamically.
Perfect Couple in Clouds
Thanks to its capabilities to decouple data from physical hardware storage while using software abstraction layers and provide scaling and fault management monitoring, Ceph is an excellent choice for the private cloud environment. The system can successfully address considerable data volumes storage needs, making it optimal for cloud, Kubernetes, OpenStack.
Ceph is designed to be self-managed and self-healing; those features keep you from spending extra human resources and give you the time for more meaningful, fundamental business matters.
With FishOS, you’re free to choose the storage system, based on Ceph or other systems, to select the one that suits you best. There are no boundaries for the decision so that you can pick any solution from the market. It will integrate smoothly and work accurately with our product, cloud management software FishOS. However, to save your time, efforts and costs, we suggest properly considering FishOS offer of storage usage.
It’s not a secret that storage vendors charge you for storage volumes: the more you use — the more you pay. This is a typical pricing model in this industry. But FishOS can break the model because it works differently. What would you say if we offer to pay the same price no matter how much storage you use?
The FishOS pricing model makes it possible to pay a fixed fee based on the number of cores and expand storage volumes to the needed extension. No hidden costs; once set, it’s up to you what storage capabilities are used. Furthermore, enjoying resizable storage, the customer gets many other options from the whole available FishOS package, including OpenStack and Kubernetes technologies, Service Manager and BeanCounter unique components or Zero-Downtime Upgrader to secure constant well-functioning workload operations.
