"Ceph isn't ready for production." - this is not the case. Ceph object-store known as RADOS is production ready and supported by Red Hat [1], in addition the b

"Ceph isn't ready for production." - this is not the case. Ceph object-store known as RADOS is production ready and supported by Red Hat [1], in addition the block-device service known as RBD which is an access method to RADOS is also production ready and supported. RBD provides many SAN like features like snapshots, cloning, and soon mirroring. The CephFS (POSIX filesystem access method) is not yet a supported product but is used by several sites in production. Ceph also provides S3/Swift object-store gateway (radosgw) so existing applications can access the object store with a compatible API. Ceph provides unified storage: providing object, block and filesystem access from a single cluster, so Ceph is the more general purpose technology. Ceph MDS provides metadata service for the CephFS POSIX-filesystem but is not needed if you're not using that feature. For development and testing Ceph will run on a single VM, or more realistically on 3 small VMs so the cluster characteristics can be explored. [1] alternatively you can buy a production grade fully supported appliance product from Fujitsu based on Ceph known as ETERNUS CD10000. For most deployments Ceph runs well on commodity hardware and the Ceph community provides excellent support too.