Open Source Object Storage for Unstructured Data: Ceph on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Servers

Reference Architecture | Product, solution, or service
will be functional, but for more complicated configurations customizing the CRUSH map is required. Tuning the map for
failure domains of the cluster helps optimize performance, improves reliability and availability, and aids manageability.
Value of a purpose-built enterprise hardware platform
An important part of planning Ceph cluster architecture is determining what kind of hardware it runs on. HP hardware brings
value to the solution in these ways:
•
Flexible compute/storage ratio
—with one, two, and three compute node chassis available, you can choose the HP
ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server model that delivers the optimal storage-to-compute ratio for your object storage access
workloads.
•
Converged design—
The HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server delivers increased storage density at lower cost.
•
Flexible IO bay
—Storage controller and network interfaces are contained within each compute node’s IO bay. 10GbE and
1GbE networking options ensure support for industry-standard network infrastructures.
•
Power management
—The SL Advanced Power Manager provides dynamic power capping and asset management
features that are standard across the HP ProLiant SL line. The converged HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server chassis also
yields power savings via shared cooling and power resources.
•
Solution integration and data center acceptance
— HP hardware described in this reference architecture has been
qualified together. This means no work building, maintaining, and qualifying ‘white box’ architectures for the cluster. HP
hardware can be validated with confidence.
•
Enterprise support
—Get dedicated solution and support resources from HP, a trusted enterprise partner. At massive
scale, system failures become part of the design even with the most reliable components. Therefore, it’s critical to have
good support infrastructure to keep system reliability and availability at acceptable levels.
•
Enterprise-class storage components
—HP Smart Array controllers provide a robust storage solution within the server.
HP drive carriers allow easy drive swaps and collect triage information to help the RMA process not only replace failures
but avoid future problems. Issues like bad drive batches and drive firmware problems are very significant for solutions
that consume and scale with large quantities of drives. HP server solutions are built to manage storage failures; HP also
qualifies and supports hard drives to minimize failure impacts.
•
HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO)
—HP iLO is an industry-leading embedded monitoring solution. Its agentless management,
diagnostic tools, and remote support allow for entire data centers to be managed with ease.
•
Enterprise-class management—
HP OneView provides infrastructure management for hardware at scale. Along with all
the other platform management value it brings, HP OneView links failed cluster components to the location of hardware
in the infrastructure.
Open source value
Businesses that use open source value the control and cost benefit it brings
Linux and Ceph provide the kind of robust and functional open source solutions these businesses want. Tradeoffs for
engineering and support versus a normal enterprise closed-source solution make sense for them.
Control
With access to the source, a business can customize solutions as needed. They can also apply bug fixes or roll new features
as needed, with the ability to see exactly what’s changing. There’s no concern about the provider of a solution going away
and making a solution unsupportable.
As an open standard, a Ceph cluster is not tied to particular hardware. This means expansion or refresh of cluster hardware
is not locked in to any vendor—choose the hardware that’s the right fit for the business case and solution parameters. The
HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server was designed with storage density and compute ratios that match unstructured data
retention and processing needs. Therefore, it’s a good match for Ceph cluster storage design.
Cost
People not familiar with open source may believe that it’s free because it’s freely available. There are, of course, engineering
costs for configuring and maintaining open source. Additionally, there are many valuable commercial software and support
solutions built on top of open source. However, closed source clusters can add significant cost per server for licensing and
support, which adds up at massive scale. Because there isn’t a paid license for open source software, adding nodes doesn’t
add upfront license costs. Also, building up expertise on the solution in -house can pay off by reducing the operating
expense (OpEx) required to support each cluster node. A proper analysis of the costs and scope of supporting an open
source solution can realize significant savings at scale.
Ceph value
Active community
It’s important that the community supporting an open source solution and code base is active. Ceph fits that description; in
2013 alone it grew its author pool from 103 to 203 and accepted major source contributions from significant storage
industry players. The community held the inaugural Ceph Developer Summit and organized Ceph Days for education and
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