Ceph’s Hidden Tax: Operational Complexity vs. a Leaner NVMe/TCP Stack

Robert Terlizzi
Robert Terlizzi
Director of Product Marketing
November 14, 2025

A pragmatic take on day‑2 realities, performance density, and TCO for leaner high‑performance NVMe over TCP block storage.

Summary

Ceph is powerful and flexible, but it’s an operations-heavy sport: multi-daemon architecture, PG math, recovery/backfill trade-offs, replication/EC choices, and (optionally) dual networks. That’s fine if your marginal SRE time is cheap (academia, intern‑heavy orgs, or regions where labor costs are a fraction of U.S. rates). If you actually need high‑performance block storage with predictable day‑2 work, a leaner NVMe over TCP stack—Lightbits for storage plus Arctera InfoScale for HA—wins on performance density, people‑efficiency, and TCO. Lightbits delivers up to 16× performance vs. Ceph storage, 50%+ lower TCO, and up to 5× less hardware for equivalent outcomes (vendor‑asserted; validate on your workloads).

What it Really Takes to Run Ceph in Production

Let’s be blunt: Ceph’s scale and flexibility surface as moving parts you must own. Production guidance is at least three monitors for quorum and availability [1][2]. Ceph runs fine on a single public network; adding a separate cluster network may help—at the cost of more configuration you now have to manage [3].

Capacity protection defaults to 3× replication. Erasure coding can reduce overhead (e.g., 4+2 → 1.5×), but Ceph’s docs are explicit about performance trade‑offs—especially during recovery/backfill [4]. You’ll also plan and tune placement groups (PGs), and during change windows you’ll often disable the autoscaler to avoid surprise rebalancing [6][7].

Finally, recovery and rebalancing are not free. Ceph provides backfill and recovery throttles because aggressive settings impact client I/O; Red Hat’s guidance recommends limiting backfill to preserve production performance [8][9][10].

NVMe/TCP: Ceph’s Gateway vs. Lightbits’ Native Approach

Ceph exposes NVMe/TCP via an NVMe‑oF gateway built on SPDK, mapping RBD images as NVMe namespaces—ideal when clients lack librbd. But it’s more infrastructure to size and operate: guidance calls for at least two gateways for HA, 10 GbE on the public net, and notes that memory footprint grows with the number of mapped images [11][12].

Lightbits embeds NVMe/TCP natively in the platform—no translation layer—delivering NVMe over standard Ethernet with modern observability (Prometheus/Grafana) and a programmable REST/gRPC surface [24][25][26].

Performance Density & TCO

Lightbits publishes up to 16× higher performance than Ceph for block workloads and ≥50% lower TCO, with a sponsored third‑party lab report to boot [19][20][16]. They also state customers can meet targets with up to 5× less hardware [21]. In OpenStack contexts, Lightbits cites up to 4.4 M IOPS per rack unit [17]. On the media side, Intelligent Flash Management claims up to 20× endurance uplift for QLC, enabling lower‑cost media at primary‑storage duty cycles [18].

Add Arctera InfoScale: SAN‑Class HA Without SAN‑Class Baggage

Arctera InfoScale brings enterprise HA/DR semantics—clustered failover, app‑aware resilience, low RTO/RPO—to modern platforms and is certified on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Lightbits and Arctera publicly announced a joint demo at KubeCon North America 2025 showing the integrated solution for OpenShift VMs/containers/AI on standard Ethernet [27][28][29].

Where Ceph Fits (and where it doesn’t)

Ceph remains excellent for capacity‑first object and file (RGW/CephFS) and for environments that can amortize SRE time across mixed workloads. For latency‑sensitive block with strict SLOs—and where people‑efficiency matters—the Lightbits + Arctera approach is the cleaner operating model with the stronger TCO story. Both sides speak modern telemetry: Ceph exposes a Prometheus exporter and can auto‑deploy Prometheus/Grafana; Lightbits integrates with Prometheus/Grafana and provides a standard REST/gRPC control plane [14][15][24][25][26].

Scorecard

DimensionCeph (today)Lightbits + Arctera
Protocol path to NVMe/TCPGateway (SPDK) mapping RBD → NVMe namespaces; extra nodes to size/operate [11][12]Native NVMe/TCP in the storage platform; no translation layer
Ops surface areaMON/MGR/OSD, PG planning, recovery/backfill throttles; optional dual networks to manage [1][3][6][8]Prometheus/Grafana dashboards + REST/gRPC automation; smaller ops blast radius for block [24][25][26]
Space efficiency3× replication by default; EC reduces overhead but impacts recovery/backfill performance [4]Data‑reduction built‑in; vendor‑published higher perf/IOPS per RU with fewer servers [17][16]
Performance densityGood with tuning; gateway hop adds complexityVendor‑published up to 16× faster vs Ceph; up to 4.4 M IOPS/RU [19][17]
Hardware footprintMore daemons; NVMe/TCP gateways add boxes [11][12]Vendor‑published up to 10× fewer servers [21]
HA/DRStrong durability; app‑aware HA/DR often DIY across componentsInfoScale provides SAN‑class HA/DR semantics on OpenShift and beyond [27][29]

Bottom Line

If your goal is ruthless simplicity and predictable economics at NVMe speeds, Ceph’s flexibility comes with a real operational tax—especially in high‑cost markets. Lightbits on NVMe/TCP gives you the performance by design. Arctera InfoScale gives you the day‑2 guarantees your platform teams demand. For modern, performance‑dense private clouds, that combination is the cleaner path.

Attribution notes: 

Ceph operational characteristics (PGs, replication vs. EC, recovery/backfill, NVMe‑oF gateways, network options) are drawn from Ceph/Red Hat documentation. Lightbits performance/TCO/footprint and endurance numbers are vendor‑asserted (with a sponsored lab report); quote as Lightbits’ published results and validate in your environment. Lightbits’ NVMe/TCP inventorship is claimed by Lightbits and supported by co‑authorship of the NVM Express TCP announcement.

To learn more about how Lightbits compares to Ceph storage, reference these additional resources:

Sources

About the writer
Robert Terlizzi
Robert Terlizzi
Director of Product Marketing
LinkedIn