The Ceph Census is a survey that shows how Ceph is being used and what kind of technologies are used alongside
Open source distributed object store and file system Ceph released its first Ceph Census on Friday, a survey that shows how Ceph is being used and what kind of technologies are used alongside.
Private cloud deployments represent 53 percent of Ceph clusters, which is considerably more than public, which represent 23 percent. Half of the reported Ceph clusters are used as storage for cloud deployments, while other primary use cases include backup and big data.
According to the data Ceph received from 81 respondents, OpenStack is the most dominant cloud stack, though there has been increasing interest in integrations with Apache CloudStack, ProxMox, OpenNebula and CloudStack.
While 81 responses is not a very big sample, it does provide a glimpse into how Ceph is used, and could offer service providers some insight into what Ceph is all about.
The total amount of storage reported was 5,635TB, and most of it is in clusters with less than 50TB. The average cluster size is around 72TB, Ceph said.
According to Ceph, it’s close to an “even three-way split between those who are assessing Ceph, those with concrete production plans, and those in production.”
“The community reported 21 production clusters with a combined raw storage of 1,154TB. Apparently the team at DreamHost didn’t participate in the Census; DreamObjects alone is over 3PB,” Inktank’s VP of community Ross Turk said.
More than half of respondents said they currently run, or plan to run, their clusters on Ubuntu, while 19 percent run clusters on Debian. Ubuntu has become increasingly popular as a server OS, and web host ServInt just launched Ubuntu as an operating system option for its VPS plans.
The raw data from the survey is available for download on Ceph’s blog.
Talk back: What do you think of the data Inktank was able to collect on Ceph? Have you used Ceph storage before? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
