Hello Ceph community! Here at Clyso we’ve been thinking quite a bit about the tuning defaults and hardware/software recommendations we will be making for users of our upcoming Clyso Enterprise Storage (CES) product based on Ceph. We decided that given how useful some of this information is both for CES and for the upstream project, we’d open the document up to the community for feedback and to help us build a better product. We’ll be adding more content as time goes on. Feel free to reach out at mark.nelson at clyso.com if you have thoughts or questions!

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Commvault has been in use as a data protection solution for years and is now looking to replace its existing storage solution (EMC), for its entire customer environments.

Commvault provides data backup through a single interface. Through the gradual deployment of Ceph S3 in several expansion stages, the customer built confidence in Ceph as a storage technology and more and more backups are gradually being transferred to the new backend.

In the first phase, Ceph S3 was allowed to excel in its performance and scalability capabilities.

In the following phases, the focus will be on flexibility and use as unified storage for cloud computing and Kubernetes.

For all these scenarios, the customer relies on Ceph as an extremely scalable, high-performance and cost-effective storage backend.

Over 1 PB of backup data and more than 500 GBytes per hour of backup throughput can be easily handled by Ceph S3 and it is ready to grow even further with the requirements in the future.

After in-depth consultation, we were able to exceed the customer’s expectations for the Ceph cluster in production.

The customer uses Commvault as a data backup solution for their entire customer environments.

Wherever the data resides, Commvault provides the backup of the data through a single interface. The customer thus avoids costly data loss scenarios, disconnected data silos, lack of recovery SLAs and inefficient scaling.

For all these scenarios, the customer relies on Ceph as a powerful and cost-effective storage backend for Commvault.

With over 2 PB of backup data and more than 1 TByte per hour of backup throughput, Ceph can easily handle and is ready to grow even further with the requirements in the future.

In conclusion, we were able to clearly exceed the customer’s expectations of the Ceph Cluster already in the test phase.

Working with our partners, we have drawn on our many years of experience with Ceph to create a compact, variable, and highly available hardware/software platform.

This storage solution is targeted at enterprises looking for a reliable and future-proof solution to store enterprise data.

We placed special focus on the flexibility and extensibility of the platform.

deployment scenarios​

For example, the storage platform is designed for the following usage scenarios:

Scenario PoC – Proof of Concept​

The platform can be equipped as a basis for PoC- Proof of Concept and then expanded for production use later.

Scenario HA – High Availability Storage Solution​

Failures of single components, like hard disks, controllers up to whole servers, can be compensated without downtime and with maximum data security.

Scenario GEO HA – Georedundant Storage Solution​

Full data center failures can be safely compensated for during operation.

Scenario replacement of existing systems

Ceph as Software Defined Storage offers several ways to import existing data.

e.g. via NFS, ISCSI, Object Storage (S3, Swift)

Tethering options​

Ceph – “The Future of Storage” offers connectivity on one platform as:

• Distributed File System
• Block Storage
• Object Storage (S3 and Swift)
• ISCSI
• RADOS

Consultation and operation​

Clyso GmbH, as members of the Ceph Founation, with its proven expertise in Ceph, will be happy to take over the tasks from planning to operation of the platform.

Today, Kubernetes is the first choice for running microservices in the public or private cloud. More and more developers and enterprises are building their applications on the modern microservice architecture.

Many of them are using Kubernetes for automated deployment of their workloads and want to benefit from the new flexibility and robustness. We are working on a solution for our customers to simplify and unify Day One and Day Two operations in their operations. With the increasing number of clusters, the management, updating and monitoring should be able to deal with it efficiently.

Since 2018, we have been accompanying Rook.io in its development and had direct exchanges with various members of the project at Cephalocon in Beijing 2018 and Barcelona 2019.

In 2019, we began serving customers in production who use Rook.io to manage Ceph.

Storage Operators for Kubernetes

Rook transforms distributed storage systems into self-managing, self-scaling and self-healing storage services. It automates the tasks of a storage administrator: provisioning, bootstrapping, configuring, deploying, scaling, upgrading, migrating, disaster recovery, monitoring, and resource management. Rook leverages the power of the Kubernetes platform to deliver its services to any storage provider through a Kubernetes operator.

[https://rook.io/](https://rook.io/)

Since 2020, we are now working on improving the automated operation of Ceph with Rook.io. Furthermore, it is planned to have the platform fully audited by various certification bodies.

At the request of a customer, we were asked to adapt the performance and capacity of their existing Ceph cluster to the growth in ongoing production.

As a result, without maintenance windows and without service interruption, we have increased the Ceph cluster by 3700% during operation.

After the acquisition of CoreOS by RedHat and the discontinuation of CoreOS support.

CoreOS Container Linux will reach its end of life on May 26, 2020 and will no longer receive updates.
(source: https://coreos.com/releases/)

We have decided together with our customer to provide an alternative to CoreOS before the 26.05.2020.

The current project name is Gardenlinux, although the name may not change until the public release.

Gardenlinux builds a full replacement for CoreOS based on Debian, without being biased by a target architecture.

Currently, the project supports the following platforms: BareMetal, AWS, GCP, Azure, VMWare, Openstack, and KVM and Docker.

Ports for AlibabaCloud are still under development.

In Produkton, Gardenlinux has already proven itself on BareMetal, KVM and AWS.

Even though microservices with Kubernetes are gaining traction in the cloud environment, we still have a high demand to serve for managing virtual machines.

To keep the technology stack as lean as possible, we are phasing out our Cloud Controller environments and managing Virtual Machines using Kubernetes.

In a further step, we are thereby able to use Kubernetes to map complete environments with microservices and virtual machines through one technology.

A customer approached us to help them build their new IaaS platform.

We helped him to evaluate the current situation and worked out a concept together with the customer from the selection of the location, the necessary hardware to the operation and implemented it together within a month.