The first day of the MSST Spring 2014 conference had Ceph front and center. It was a beautiful late spring day on the Santa Clara University campus in California. Jean-Charles Lopez from Inktank led us off with a detailed background in Ceph’s inner workings. The inventor of Ceph, Sage Weil, was on hand to provide an even deeper dive into the internals. Can I summarize by saying that the Object Storage Device is connected to the journal, librados (direct access through libraries), radosgw (REST gateway), libcephfs (POSIX), and librados (block)? I don’t do the hours of presentation justice with one sentence. The whole of the Inktank Ceph presentation can be found here. I can say that between the access flexibility and their CRUSH data placement algorithm, Ceph is an impressive storage solution. We ranged from Ceph on paper to Ceph in action. The session wrapped up with a full tutorial using a pre-built VM to install Ceph v0.67 Dumpling on. It went very smoothly. I learned new things about Ceph and how to run a training session. Thanks Inktank!
We transitioned into the Seagate Kinetic project. Ricky Huynh and Chiaming Yang lead the presentation. Kinetic pushes the boundary of traditional disks. Seagate has shruged off the commodity label and created something new out of their standard disk offering. They have replaced the onboard SATA daughter card with a CPU, an ethernet connector, and an key-value API. This fits nicely with Ceph, so the bottom layer of disk services can be replaced with a Kinetic key-value disk. No more pesky file structures. While this solution doesn’t likely fit all use cases for distributed storage, it is a welcome option in the nascent field of new tricks for spinning platters. Sage Weil pulled double duty by presenting the technical benefits of Ceph on Kinetic. No Kinetic presentations posted yet. I will update this post when they are available.
This was a good day. See you tomorrow.
