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I love Ceph, I even wrote an intro about it for those who are not familiar with it. https://louwrentius.com/understanding-ceph-open-source-scalable-storage.htm

I love Ceph, I even wrote an intro about it for those who are not familiar with it. https://louwrentius.com/understanding-ceph-open-source-scalable-storage.html https://louwrentius.com/understanding-ceph-open-source-scala... But Ceph is not designed to be a competitor to BTRFS or ZFS. The core vision of Ceph is scalability. If you need petabytes of storage and the performance to scale with it, take a look at Ceph. I may be totally wrong here, but from what I understand about Ceph, it's not meant as a file system for a single computer. I don't understand the idea of running Ceph on your laptop/desktop. It's possible to run it that way but it defeats it's purpose. I've build a small lab setup with Ceph: https://louwrentius.com/my-ceph-test-cluster-based-on-raspberry-pis-and-hp-microservers.html https://louwrentius.com/my-ceph-test-cluster-based-on-raspbe... Also, there's the issue of performance, in particular latency. That's a bit of a weak spot of Ceph, from what I can tell. Again, may be wrong. But I found these notes interesting. https://yourcmc.ru/wiki/Ceph_performance https://yourcmc.ru/wiki/Ceph_performance

seabrookmx 7y ago
This. In fact, it's really common to use a ZFS array on single nodes, and then create a SAN using multiple such machines by layering Ceph on top.
- louwrentius 7y ago
  That's interesting, but it's layers upon layers... (RIP latency), I think. Unless it's about just bandwidth and volume, then latency is not that big of a deal.
  - seabrookmx 7y ago
    You don't have to use ZFS snapshots. I haven't run a system like this in production but presumably you choose ZFS because it's flexible in how you configure the arrays (as is say, LVM) and because it supports checksumming.
gravypod 7y ago
I never really store data on my local machines anymore. All of my data is either hosted only on, or backed up to, my storage server. I think the selling point of ceph is that every server in my apartment can be part of my storage cluster and data I really want to avoid loosing can be persisted across all of them. For me latency isn't really a large issue. I read and write everything locally on my SSD-backed desktop/laptop and then sync my files to my storage node via git or rsync or something. For me data integrity and availability are important.

seabrookmx 7y ago

This. In fact, it's really common to use a ZFS array on single nodes, and then create a SAN using multiple such machines by layering Ceph on top.

louwrentius 7y ago
That's interesting, but it's layers upon layers... (RIP latency), I think. Unless it's about just bandwidth and volume, then latency is not that big of a deal.
- seabrookmx 7y ago
  You don't have to use ZFS snapshots. I haven't run a system like this in production but presumably you choose ZFS because it's flexible in how you configure the arrays (as is say, LVM) and because it supports checksumming.

gravypod 7y ago

I never really store data on my local machines anymore. All of my data is either hosted only on, or backed up to, my storage server. I think the selling point of ceph is that every server in my apartment can be part of my storage cluster and data I really want to avoid loosing can be persisted across all of them. For me latency isn't really a large issue. I read and write everything locally on my SSD-backed desktop/laptop and then sync my files to my storage node via git or rsync or something. For me data integrity and availability are important.