Ceph: A Scalable, High-Performance Distributed File System

Appeared in Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '06).

Abstract

We have developed Ceph, a distributed file system that provides excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. Ceph maximizes the separation between data and metadata management by replacing allocation tables with a pseudo-random data distribution function (CRUSH) designed for heterogeneous and dynamic clusters of unreliable object storage devices (OSDs). We leverage device intelligence by distributing data replication, failure detection and recovery to semi-autonomous OSDs running a specialized local object file system. A dynamic distributed metadata cluster provides extremely efficient metadata management and seamlessly adapts to a wide range of general purpose and scientific computing file system workloads. Performance measurements under a variety of workloads show that Ceph has excellent I/O performance and scalable metadata management, supporting more than 250,000 metadata operations per second.

Publication date:
November 2006

Authors:
Sage Weil
Scott A. Brandt
Ethan L. Miller
Darrell D. E. Long
Carlos Maltzahn

Projects:
Ultra-Large Scale Storage

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{weil-osdi06,
  author       = {Sage Weil and Scott A. Brandt and Ethan L. Miller and Darrell D. E. Long and Carlos Maltzahn},
  title        = {Ceph: A Scalable, High-Performance Distributed File System},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '06)},
  month        = nov,
  year         = {2006},
}