Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

• A cost-effective way to provide storage to virtual machines
• Easy and efficient way to create back ups of images
• Very quick storage request and provisioning

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• Very scalable solution
• Providing very fast storage
• Very good integration with KVM, libvirt and OpenStack through Cinder

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• Cost can be confusing to determine
• The initial learning curve can be confusing unless you know what's going on with AWS
• You can lose track of EBS if you aren't organized

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• Ceph is very difficult to set up when we used it. One had to be very careful in how they assigned their crush maps and cache tiering to get it to work right otherwise performance would be impacted and data would not be distributed evenly. From the .96 version I ran, it really is intended to be used for massive data centers in the petabytes. Beyond that the command line arguments for ceph-deploy and ceph are very involved. I would strongly recommend this as a back end for Open Stack with a dedicated Linux savvy storage engineer. Red Hat also said they are working to turn Calamari in to a full featured front end to manage OSD nodes which should make this much easier to manage in the future.
• It should not be run off of VMs themselves since it is not optimized for a VM Kernel. This advice is coming directly from Red Hat. Unfortunately this means that smaller use cases are out of the question since it literally requires 10 physical machines, each with their own OS to become individual OSD nodes.
• I believe this is an issue with the OSDs and not the monitors which ran fine for us in a virtual machine environment.
• We where looking at using this as a NFS work alike and in our experiments encountered a couple of issues. the MDS server struggled to mount the CephFS file system on more than a few systems without seizing up. This isn't a huge concern when it is used as a back end for Open Stack however when using this as shared storage for production data on a web cluster proved to be problematic to us. We also would have liked to have NFS access to the Ceph monitors so we could attach this to VMWare in order to store our VMDKs since VMWare does not support mounting CephFS. When we spoke with VMWare about 7 months ago they said NFS support is in the pipeline which will address all of these concerns.

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• Gives us an easy way to manage and move assets around VMs.
• Allows a quick and easy way to clone existing images.
• Gives us an efficient way to back up and restore images.

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• CephFS was unable to handle several mounts at the same time. We will revisit NFS capabilities once available.
• We gained quit a bit of experience with Ceph and we have a cluster on hand if our storage vendor doesn't pan out at any time in the future.
• It had a negative impact in the time it took for us to test set up and test the cluster. Like I explained earlier, it was quite difficult to set up for experimentation. That said though, we have a very broad understanding of Ceph for our future products.

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