ceph/doc/start/why_use_ceph.rst
John Wilkins a1b31ddfda Initial cut of introduction, getting started, and installing. More to do on installation. RADOS gateway to follow.
Signed-off-by: John Wilkins <john.wilkins@dreamhost.com>
Signed-off-by: Tommi Virtanen <tommi.virtanen@dreamhost.com>
2012-05-02 12:09:54 -07:00

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Why use Ceph?
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Ceph provides an economic and technical foundation for massive scalability.
Financial constraints limit scalability. Ceph is free and open source, which means it does not require expensive
license fees or expensive updates. Ceph can run on economical commodity hardware, which reduces one economic barrier to scalability. Ceph is easy to install and administer, so it reduces expenses related to administration. Ceph supports popular and widely accepted interfaces (e.g., POSIX-compliance, Swift, Amazon S3, FUSE, etc.). So Ceph provides a compelling solution for building petabyte-to-exabyte scale storage systems.
Technical and personnel constraints also limit scalability. The performance profile of highly scaled systems
can very substantially. With intelligent load balancing and adaptive metadata servers that re-balance the file system dynamically, Ceph alleviates the administrative burden of optimizing performance. Additionally, because Ceph provides for data replication, Ceph is fault tolerant. Ceph administrators can simply replace a failed host by subtituting new hardware without having to rely on complex fail-over scenarios. With POSIX semantics for Unix/Linux-based operating systems, popular interfaces like Swift or Amazon S3, and advanced features like directory-level snapshots, system administrators can deploy enterprise applications on Ceph, and provide those applications with a long-term economical solution for scalable persistence.
Reasons to use Ceph include:
- Extraordinary scalability
- Terabytes to exabytes
- Tens of thousands of client nodes
- Standards compliant
- Virtual file system (vfs)
- Shell (bash)
- FUSE
- Swift-compliant interface
- Amazon S3-compliant interface
- Reliable and fault-tolerant
- Strong data consistency and safety semantics
- Intelligent load balancing and dynamic re-balancing
- Semi-autonomous data replication
- Node monitoring and failure detection
- Hot swappable hardware
- Economical (Ceph is free!)
- Open source and free
- Uses heterogeneous commodity hardware
- Easy to setup and maintain