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All About CEPH Storage

5 min read - May 7, 2025

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Table of contents

  • All About Ceph Storage
  • What Is Ceph?
  • Block-Based Storage
  • Object-Based Storage
  • File System Storage
  • Why Ceph Is Ideal for Emerging IT Infrastructures
  • Easy to Manage
  • Scalable by Design
  • Reliable and Fault-Tolerant
  • Conclusion

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With the rise of modern workloads namely cloud infrastructure, media repositories, data analytics, backup and restore systems require a massive storage solution to manage critical business data. To cater such needs, Ceph storage comes with a scalable, open, software-defined storage platform.

All About Ceph Storage

Modern workloads—such as cloud infrastructure, media repositories, data analytics, and backup systems—demand massive, flexible storage solutions to manage critical business data. Ceph offers a powerful answer: a scalable, open-source, software-defined storage platform that can free organizations from costly, proprietary systems.

Let’s take a closer look at how Ceph works and why it’s becoming a key component of next-generation IT infrastructure.


What Is Ceph?

Ceph is an open-source, unified, and distributed software storage system that delivers scalable and reliable clustered storage within a single platform. It is designed to run on commodity hardware and leverages an algorithm called CRUSH (Controlled Replication Under Scalable Hashing) to evenly distribute data across clusters and sub-clusters. This approach simplifies data management and enables efficient retrieval at scale.

Ceph supports three types of storage under one system:

  • Object-based storage
  • Block-based storage
  • File system storage

Block-Based Storage

Ceph can function as a block device that connects to virtual machines or bare-metal Linux servers. Its block storage system, known as RADOS (Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store), offers features such as snapshots, replication, and integration with OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) as a backend.

Benefits of Block-Based Storage:

  • Scales with Linux and other virtualized environments
  • Thin provisioning for efficient storage use
  • Snapshot support (read-only and revert)
  • Dynamic resizing of storage images

Object-Based Storage

Client applications can directly access Ceph’s object-based storage via software libraries that interface with librados. This architecture provides a seamless gateway to Ceph clusters.

Interfaces Supported by Ceph Object Storage:

  • Swift-Compatible: Works with a large subset of the OpenStack Swift API
  • S3-Compatible: Supports a wide range of Amazon S3 REST API operations

File System Storage

Ceph’s file system (CephFS) operates on the same object storage foundation and provides both block and object storage capabilities. It uses a POSIX-compliant interface to ensure compatibility with existing applications and file operations.

Ceph’s metadata server cluster handles the mapping of file system directory structures to RADOS objects. These servers can scale dynamically to manage load and maintain high performance.

Benefits of Ceph File System (CephFS):

  • Automatic load balancing for optimized performance
  • Virtually unlimited scalability
  • Built-in data protection for mission-critical applications
  • Seamless POSIX compliance—no customization required

Why Ceph Is Ideal for Emerging IT Infrastructures

As organizations face exponential data growth, they increasingly seek cost-effective storage solutions that scale with demand. Ceph meets this need by combining flexibility, reliability, and performance into a single platform.


Easy to Manage

Ceph simplifies scaling without significantly increasing capital or operational costs. Features such as automatic cluster rebalancing, intelligent daemons, and fault recovery are handled by Ceph's distributed architecture and Object Storage Daemons (OSDs). Ceph monitors continuously oversee cluster health and ensure data availability.


Scalable by Design

Data distribution and replication are core to Ceph’s scalability. A hashing function maps data objects to placement groups, which are then assigned to OSDs using the CRUSH algorithm. This ensures efficient and balanced data storage and replication across the cluster.


Reliable and Fault-Tolerant

Ceph ensures data safety by replicating updates and maintaining consistency across the cluster. In the event of a hardware or network failure, Ceph quickly detects issues and initiates recovery to maintain system stability and data integrity.


Conclusion

Ceph offers a comprehensive, software-defined storage solution that addresses the core needs of modern IT: scalability, reliability, and performance. Its open-source nature and flexibility make it an increasingly popular choice among cloud providers, web hosts, and enterprises managing large-scale data environments.

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