Ceph: A Scalable Object-Based Storage System

Appeared in Technical Report UCSC-SSRC-06-01.

Abstract

The data storage needs of large high-performance and general-purpose computing environments are generally best served by distributed storage systems. Traditional solutions, exemplified by NFS, provide a simple distributed storage system model, but cannot meet the demands of high-performance computing environments where a single server may become a bottleneck, nor do they scale well due to the need to manually partition (or repartition) the data among the servers. Object-based storage promises to address these needs through a simple networked data storage unit, the Object Storage Device (OSD) that manages all local storage issues and exports a simple read/write data interface. Despite this simple concept, many challenges remain, including efficient object storage, centralized metadata management, data and metadata replication, and data and metadata reliability. We describe Ceph, a distributed object-based storage system that meets these challenges, providing high-performance file storage that scales directly with the number of OSDs and Metadata servers.

Publication date:
March 2006

Authors:
Sage Weil
Feng Wang
Qin Xin
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-ssrctr06,
  author       = {Sage Weil and Feng Wang and Qin Xin and Scott A. Brandt and Ethan L. Miller and Darrell D. E. Long and Carlos Maltzahn},
  title        = {Ceph: A Scalable Object-Based Storage System},
  booktitle    = {Technical Report UCSC-SSRC-06-01},
  month        = mar,
  year         = {2006},
}