Ceph : A Scalable Object-Based Storage System Technical Report UCSC-SSRC-06-01 March 2006

The data storage needs of large high-performance and general-purpose computing environments are generally best served by distributed storage systems. Traditional so lutions, exemplified by NFS, provide a simple distributed storage system model, but cannot meet the demands of high-performance computing environments where a single server may become a bottleneck, nor do they scale well due to the need to manually partition (or repartition) the data among the servers. Object-based storage promises to address these needs through a simple networked data storage unit, the Object Storage Device (OSD) that manages all local storage issues and exports a simple read/write data interface. Despite this simple concept, many challenges remain, including efficient object storage, centralized metadata management, data and metadata replication, and data and metadata reliability. We describe Ceph, a distributed object-based storage system that meets these challenges, providing highperformance file storage that scales directly with the number of OSDs and Metadata servers.