Enterprise Ceph Storage: Scalable, Durable & Unified Storage for OpenStack

Ceph is the industry-standard storage backend for OpenStack private clouds. VM2Cloud delivers Ceph-as-a-Service with high durability, high throughput, and unified object, block, and file storage—all fully managed end-to-end.

Why Ceph?

• Unified storage: Block, Object, and File
• Near-infinite scalability—add nodes with no downtime
• Self-healing & fault-tolerant
• Perfect integration with OpenStack Cinder, Nova & Glance

VM2Cloud Ceph Capabilities

Automated deployment, OSD lifecycle management, erasure coding, replication tuning, hardware optimization, monitoring, and SLA-backed operations.

How Ceph Stores Data

Ceph is a distributed storage system that spreads data across many servers instead of relying on a single array. Data is broken into objects and placed across storage daemons, called OSDs, using the CRUSH placement algorithm, which lets the cluster calculate where data lives without a central lookup table. When a disk or a server fails, the cluster re-creates the lost copies or fragments elsewhere from the data that remains, which is what people mean by self-healing.

Three Ways to Consume It

Block storage (RBD)

RADOS Block Device (RBD) images back OpenStack block volumes. Volumes attach to instances and survive instance deletion. Snapshots are copy-on-write, so they are quick to take and use little extra space until the data changes. In Cinder, each volume type can point at a different Ceph pool, which is how one cloud can offer storage tiers with different performance profiles.

Object storage (RGW)

The RADOS Gateway (RGW) provides an object storage endpoint that speaks the S3 API, so tools built for S3, such as Restic, Velero, rclone and the boto3 library, can work with it once they are pointed at that endpoint.

File storage (CephFS)

CephFS provides a shared, POSIX-style file system that several clients can mount at once, which suits shared working directories and analytics workloads.

Durability: Replication and Erasure Coding

Ceph protects data in one of two ways. Replication keeps several full copies of each object on different failure domains, which is simple and fast to read. Erasure coding splits data into fragments plus parity, so it can survive the loss of some fragments while using less raw capacity than full copies, at the cost of more computation on writes and recovery. Choosing between them, pool by pool, is a design decision driven by the workload.

How It Fits With OpenStack

• Cinder creates block volumes in Ceph pools, and Nova attaches them to instances.
• Glance can store images in Ceph. When an image is in raw format and the new volume or instance disk is also on Ceph, it can be created as a copy-on-write clone of the image instead of a full copy.
• Nova can boot instances from Ceph-backed volumes.
• Applications on the same cloud can use object storage through the S3 API.

What Shapes a Ceph Design

A Ceph design starts from the workload: the performance tiers it needs, the capacity held today and expected later, how much failure the applications must tolerate, and how the storage network and hardware will be laid out.

Request a Ceph Architecture Review

We will analyze your storage performance, capacity needs, and growth roadmap.