Implement and manage your software-defined, massively scalable storage system

About This Book

• Explore Ceph's architecture in order to achieve scalability and high availability
• Learn to utilize Ceph efficiently with the help of practical examples
• Successfully implement Ceph clusters to scale-out storage solutions along with outstanding data protection

Who This Book Is For

A basic knowledge of GNU/Linux, and storage systems, and server components is assumed. If you have no experience of software-defined storage solutions and Ceph, but are eager to learn about them, this is the book for you.

What You Will Learn

• The limitations of existing systems and why you should use Ceph as a storage solution
• Familiarity with Ceph's architecture, components, and services
• Instant deployment and testing of Ceph within a Vagrant and VirtualBox environment
• Ceph operations including maintenance, monitoring, and troubleshooting
• Storage provisioning of Ceph's block, object, and filesystem services
• Integrate Ceph with OpenStack
• Advanced topics including erasure coding, CRUSH maps, and performance tuning
• Best practices for your Ceph clusters

In Detail

Learning Ceph, Second Edition will give you all the skills you need to plan, deploy, and effectively manage your Ceph cluster. You will begin with the first module, where you will be introduced to Ceph use cases, its architecture, and core projects. In the next module, you will learn to set up a test cluster, using Ceph clusters and hardware selection. After you have learned to use Ceph clusters, the next module will teach you how to monitor cluster health, improve performance, and troubleshoot any issues that arise. In the last module, you will learn to integrate Ceph with other tools such as OpenStack, Glance, Manila, Swift, and Cinder.

By the end of the book you will have learned to use Ceph effectively for your data storage requirements.

Style and approach

This step-by-step guide, including use cases and examples, not only helps you to easily use Ceph but also demonstrates how you can use it to solve any of your server or drive storage issues.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introducing Ceph Storage

Chapter 2: Ceph Components and Services

Chapter 3: Hardware and Network Selection

Chapter 4: Planning Your Deployment

Chapter 5: Deploying a Virtual Sandbox Cluster

Chapter 6: Operations and Maintenance

Chapter 7: Monitoring Ceph

Chapter 8: Ceph Architecture: Under the Hood

Chapter 9: Storage Provisioning with Ceph

Chapter 10: Integrating Ceph with OpenStack

Chapter 11: Performance and Stability Tuning

bout the Authors

Anthony D'Atri's career in system administration has spanned laptops to vector supercomputers. He has brought his passion for fleet management and the underlying server components to bear on a holistic yet, detailed approach to deployment and operations. Experience with architecture, operation, and troubleshooting of NetApp, ZFS, SVM, and other storage systems dovetailed neatly into Ceph. Three years with Ceph as a petabyte-scale object and block backend to multiple OpenStack clouds at Cisco, additionally built on Anthony's depth. Now helping deliver awesome storage to DigitalOcean's droplet customers, Anthony aims to help the growing community build success with Ceph..

Anthony would like to thank everyone whose technical and professional support have contributed to his success with Ceph, including Cisco, Digital Ocean, Michael Kidd, Tupper Cole, James Donohoe, Louis Watta, Jade Lester, Narendra Trivedi, Weiguo Sun, Richard "Fuzzy" Miller, Damon Hsu-Hung, Satish Sangapu, Shweta Saraf, Swati Gaikwad, Yi Chen, Ryan Roemmich, Sebastian Sobolewski, Stan Ayzenberg, Sébastien Han, Adam Wolfe Gordon, Vaibhav Bhembre, William Lehman, and Dan van der Ster. Paramount thanks to his wife Suzanne for her support, patience, and support of his long hours.

Vaibhav Bhembre is a systems programmer working currently as a Technical Lead for cloud storage products at DigitalOcean. Before joining DigitalOcean, Vaibhav wore multiple hats leading backend engineering and reliability engineering teams at Sailthru Inc. From helping scale dynamically generated campaign sends to be delivered to over tens of millions of users on time, to architecting a cloud-scale compute and storage platform, Vaibhav has years of experience writing software across all layers of the stack.

Vaibhav holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai and a master’s degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York in Buffalo. During his time in academia, Vaibhav co-published a novel graph algorithm that optimally computed closeness and betweeness in an incrementally updating social network. He also had the fortune of committing changes to a highly available distributed file-system built on top of iRODs data management framework as his master’s project. This system, that was actively used across 10+ educational institutions live, was his foray into large-scale distributed storage and his transition into using Ceph professionally was only natural.

Vaibhav is forever indebted to his parents Dileep and Vandana Bhembre for devoting incalculable amount of time and effort into making him who he is today. He cannot thank his beautiful wife, Harshita, enough for her constant support, encouragement and most of all, her incredible heart. Vaibhav wholeheartedly thanks all the individuals who have contributed directly or indirectly to his successful career, the list which includes but is not limited to, Prof. Rakesh Nagi, Prof. Murat Demirbas, Sushant Khopkar, Ian White, Moisey Uretsky, Joonas Bergius, and Anthony D’Atri. And finally, Vaibhav is deeply grateful to the Ceph community for designing and building a remarkable piece of software and forming a diverse and open community around it.

Karan Singh is a senior storage architect working with Red Hat and living with his charming wife Monika in Finland. In his current role, Karan is doing solution engineering on Ceph together with partners, customers and exploring new avenues for software defined storage.

Karan devotes a part of his time in learning emerging technologies and enjoys the challenges that comes with it.. He also authored the first edition of Learning Ceph and Ceph Cookbook, Packt Publishing. You can reach him on Twitter @karansingh010.

I’d like to thank my wife, Monika for being the perfect better half. I’d also like to thank my employer Red Hat for giving me an opportunity to work on some cutting-edge technologies and use cases. Finally, special thanks to Vikhyat and Michael for putting great efforts to help in the continued success of Learning Ceph