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

Executive summary
Explosive data growth, expansion of Big Data and unstructured data and the pervasiveness of mobile devices continually
pressure traditional file and block storage architectures. Businesses are exploring emerging storage architectures like
object storage to help deal with these trends to provide cost-effective storage solutions that keep up with capacity growth
while providing the service level agreements to meet business and customer requirements.
Enterprise-class storage subsystems are designed to address storage requirements for business-critical transactional data
latencies. However, this may not be an optimal solution for unstructured data and backup/archival storage. In these cases,
enterprise-class reliability is still required, but massive scale-out capacity and lower solution investment are more important
than minimal latency.
Object storage software solutions are designed to run on industry-standard server platforms, offering lower infrastructure
costs and scalability beyond the capacity points of typical file server storage subsystems. Ceph running on HP ProLiant
hardware is a comprehensive and cost-effective object storage solution for addressing scale-out storage needs.
HP hardware combined with Ceph on Linux delivers an open source object storage solution that:
• Has software capable of scaling from dozens of terabytes, to exabytes of data and billions of objects
• Lowers upfront solution investment and total cost of ownership (TCO) per gigabyte
• Provides enterprise-class infrastructure monitoring and management
• Does not require cluster software licensing as the cluster is scaled
• Provides a single software-defined storage (SDS) cluster with block, object, and file access
• Uses open source, minimizing concerns about vendor lock-in, and increasing flexibility of hardware and software choice
• Can integrate into an OpenStack deployment
Target audience: CTOs and Solution Architects looking for a storage solution that handles the rapid growth of unstructured
data, cloud and archival storage while controlling licensing and infrastructure costs. This paper assumes knowledge of
enterprise data center administration challenges and familiarity with data center configuration and deployment best
practices, primarily with regard to storage systems. It also assumes the reader appreciates the challenges and benefits
open source solutions can bring, especially for early adopters of object storage.
This reference architecture describes testing performed by HP in March 2014.