OpenStack Foundation Survey Cites Ceph as a Leading Distribution for Block Storage

scuttlemonkey

Wow, the last few weeks have been very busy for the Ceph team! While it may have been a few weeks ago, many of us are still feeling the excitement of the most recent OpenStack Summit, and many of us weren’t even there! With the Firefly release still cooling in the packaging repos, there certainly was a lot for the Ceph Community to be excited about. However it was the voices of the users that once again made us the most excited. The results from another OpenStack Foundation OpenStack User Survey was made public at the conference and it has extremely encouraging results for Ceph open source and software-defined storage alike.

The OpenStack Foundation survey results showed that among OpenStack users surveyed, Ceph is a leader across the board for block storage in clouds of all stages. Ceph is cited as one of the leading distributed block storage technology in all three categories.

1,780 people worldwide responded to the survey, covering a total of 506 OpenStack deployments. The United States and Canada accounted for 195 of the OpenStack clouds, with 143 from Europe and 107 from Asia. Across all of those sites, there were 210 development/test clouds, 218 proof-of-concept clouds, and 209 production clouds managing real workloads.

The study found:

  • 20 percent of respondents indicate Ceph is their block storage driver of choice for production clouds, with Ceph ranking at number two in the category;
  • 18 percent of respondents selected Ceph for development/test clouds, with Ceph ranking second in the category, and;
  • 15 percent of respondent currently leverage Ceph for proof-of-concept clouds, with Ceph ranking third in the category.

Of course, one of the most surprising things for me was the sheer number of people who still didn’t know what Ceph does, or hadn’t heard of us at all. I guess this just goes to show that a community manager’s job is never done!

For the uninitiated, Ceph can be used by anyone running OpenStack as a low-cost, highly scalable block storage solution that provides a fast, thinly provisioned disk for virtual machines. This can significantly reduce cost for cloud deployments. With Ceph’s data replication and intelligent data placement on commodity hardware, users can eliminate the need for expensive proprietary block storage and gain the speed, reliability and features they need without vendor lock-in. The result is a storage system that runs on commodity hardware, which can grow to exabyte-scale as a company’s cloud grows.

To put it in perspective, Sage Weil, creator of Ceph and Lead Ceph Architect, had this to say about OpenStack: “As OpenStack matures and gains momentum, I expect more and more users with diverse storage will need block storage that provides painless scaling, seamless data migration and ease of administration, all at a low cost per gigabyte. With so many block storage options out there to choose from, we’re pleased to learn that Ceph is a top choice for OpenStack users with these exacting storage requirements. Having been officially integrated with OpenStack since its Folsom release in 2012, it’s been exciting to witness users embracing both the platform and cloud storage.”

This was quite a show for the Ceph Community filled with the celebration of the release of Firefly and continued interest in Ceph block storage. Most importantly is the continued commitment that Ceph will work to deliver the best distributed storage option for OpenStack users across a wide variety of platforms and use cases. It’s an exciting time to be a part of the OpenStack cloud!

scuttlemonkey out