Smarter Private Cloud Architecture Starts with Faster, Simpler Storage.
As organizations accelerate their migration to agile on-premises clouds, selecting a high-performance storage stack for OpenStack, OpenShift, and Kubernetes environments is critical.
Historically, enterprises have turned to Ceph Storage—and its commercial enterprise distribution, Red Hat Ceph Storage—as an open-source unified platform for private cloud workloads, persistent container volumes, and data lakes. While Ceph excels at horizontal scalability, its underlying legacy architecture introduces heavy operational complexity and strict performance bottlenecks for modern workloads.
Lightbits LightOS delivers the ideal alternative or augmentation strategy to maximize your block storage performance. Natively engineered for NVMe-over-TCP, Lightbits shatters Ceph’s limitations:
- 16X Higher Throughput: Tap into the true power of flash storage with an optimized direct data path.
- Ultra-Low Latency: Consistently maintain under 100-microsecond response times at cloud scale.
- 50% Hardware Reduction: Lower your TCO and eliminate complexity by requiring fewer copies of your data to maintain strict SLAs.
Running Ceph + Lightbits in parallel delivers better cost efficiency and performance. Here’s how it works:
- Ceph stays: cost-effective for batch jobs, archives, general file service, and non-latency-sensitive workloads.
- Lightbits takes over: business-critical latency-sensitive databases, real-time analytics, and high-transactional workloads delivering up to 16X performance, 50%+ lower TCO using up to 5X less hardware.
What is Ceph storage? Ceph is an open-source, software-defined storage platform designed to provide a single, highly scalable system for object, block, and file storage. What is Red Hat Ceph storage? Red Hat Ceph Storage (RHCS) is the commercial, enterprise-grade distribution of the open-source Ceph storage platform.
Highly-Rated by Customers on Gartner
Compared to other primary storage platform vendors, Lightbits Labs earns 4.7 stars on Gartner Peer Reviews.
Lightbits Comparison with Ceph Storage
| Ceph Storage | Lightbits | Lightbits Advantage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speed (Throughput) | Good. Limited by Ceph’s NVMe-oF gateway | 16x faster than Ceph | Ceph’s NVMe-oF gateway introduces additional architectural complexity, leading to bottlenecks and increased storage networking latency. Lightbits is engineered for direct and high-performance host connectivity. |
| Latency | High latency in large clusters | Low latency (typically under 100 microseconds) | |
| Data Persistence | Yes, but slower | High persistence with built-in data resilience | Lightbits provides better persistence features, ensuring reliability and fast recovery. |
| Scalability | Scalable, but can require significant resources for large clusters | Seamless scalability with automatic expansion | Ceph may need more manual intervention when scaling. |
| Automation | Minimal. Difficult to support in a production environment. | Fully automated management features. Simple to manage at scale. | Lightbits offers better automation features for easy integration with DevOps processes. |
| Cost Efficiency | Requires more hardware to reach the same performance levels as Lightbits | Industry-leading price-performance value | Lightbits is more cost-effective for performance-sensitive workloads at scale |
| Storage Architecture | Open-source, distributed object, file, and block storage architecture originally intended for HDDs, many core design elements optimizing HDD behavior remain | Designed with NVMe over TCP with a focus on performance, scalability, resiliency, and cost-efficiency. | Ceph offers a more traditional distributed storage model, whereas Lightbits focuses on NVMe storage for superior performance. |
| Cloud Integration | Yes, but can be complex to manage | Simple and seamless integrations with Kubernetes, OpenShift, and OpenStack | Ceph requires more customization. |
| Data Protection | Strong data protection via replication and erasure coding | Advanced data protection with built-in redundancy and persistence | Lightbits offers advanced protection and data resilience compared to Ceph’s traditional approaches. |
| Support | Fail recovery time is significantly longer, and debugging is extremely complex. Innovation and development are declining over time. | Fast failover is measured in seconds for HA, and rebuild/restart times are measured in minutes with routine, monthly software releases. | Lightbits’ architecture is designed to prioritize rapid restoration of service and data integrity with an Engineering team dedicated to your success. |
Ceph Storage Challenges for OpenStack, OpenShift, and Kubernetes
Advantages and Disadvantages Of Ceph Block Storage
Ceph Storage Challenges for OpenStack, OpenShift, and Kubernetes
Ceph Storage offers significant benefits in terms of scalability and flexibility, its complexity and resource requirements necessitate careful planning and management, especially in dynamic environments like Kubernetes, OpenStack, and OpenShift.
Operational Complexity:
Ceph can have complex configurations and require specialized expertise to implement and manage which can increase OpEx.
Resource Management:
Ceph can be resource-intensive, requiring significant CPU, memory, and network resources to achieve higher levels of performance—especially for the block storage. Proper HW provisioning is crucial to avoid performance bottlenecks. Both of which can add to infrastructure, CapEx, and OpEx costs.
Performance Tuning:
Good Ceph performance is dependent on a robust and high-performance network. Network latency and bandwidth can significantly impact Ceph’s performance.
Advantages and Disadvantages Of Ceph Block Storage
While Ceph storage is a good choice in many situations, it comes with some disadvantages too.
Advantages
» Despite its limited development history, Ceph is free and is an established storage method.
» The application has been extensively and well-documented by the manufacturer.
» A great deal of helpful information is available online for Ceph regarding its setup and maintenance.
» The scalability and integrated redundancy of Ceph storage ensure data security and flexibility within the network.
» CRUSH algorithm of Ceph ensures high availability.
Disadvantages
» To be able to fully use all of Ceph’s functionalities, a comprehensive network is required due to the variety of components being provided.
» The set-up of Ceph storage is relatively time-consuming, and sometimes the user cannot be entirely sure where the data is physically being stored.
» It requires significant engineering resources and oversight to implement and manage
Ceph Storage: Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Ceph Storage Not Enough for Modern Workloads?
While there is no denying the fact that Ceph is highly scalable and a one-size-fits-all solution, it has some inherent architectural loopholes. Ceph storage is not suitable for modern workloads for the following reasons:
1. Organizations either working with the public cloud, using their own private cloud or supporting modern applications require low latency and consistent response times. While BlueStore (a back-end object store for Ceph OSDs) helps to improve average and tail latency to an extent, it cannot necessarily take advantage of the benefits of NVMe flash.
2. Modern workloads typically deploy local flash, (local NVMe flash), on bare metal to get the best possible performance and Ceph is not architected to fully leverage the performance of this media. In fact, Ceph in a Kubernetes environment where local flash is recommended, can be an order of magnitude slower than local flash.
3. Ceph has a comparatively poor flash utilization (15-25%). In case of a failure with Ceph or the host, the rebuild time for shared storage needs can be very slow because of massive traffic going over the network for a long period.
How does Ceph work as a distributed storage system?
Ceph Storage operates as a distributed storage system by replicating and distributing data across a cluster of commodity hardware servers, eliminating any single point of failure. Ceph uses the CRUSH (Controlled Replication Under Scalable Hashing) algorithm which allows client nodes to dynamically calculate where data is located.
What is the difference between Ceph block, object, and file storage?
Ceph Storage is a unified storage platform that provides three storage interfaces from a single underlying cluster:
- Block Storage: Delivers VM disks with high performance, thin provisioning, and snapshot capabilities.
- Object Storage: Offers an S3 and Swift-compatible RESTful interface designed for unstructured data, archiving, and massive scaling.
- File Storage: Provides a POSIX-compliant, shared filesystem that allows multiple client servers to concurrently mount and access data.
How does Ceph storage work?
Ceph Storage works by utilizing an underlying object store called RADOS (Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store). When data is written, Ceph breaks it into objects and distributes it across OSDs using the CRUSH algorithm. The cluster is managed by three core daemons:
- OSDs (Object Storage Daemons): Store the actual data, handle data replication, and perform recovery.
- Monitors (MONs): Maintain the cluster membership, health maps, and overall state.
- Managers (MGRs): Track runtime metrics and cluster utilization.
What is Ceph storage in OpenStack?
OpenStack storage solutions, such as Ceph Storage and LightOS from Lightbits Labs, serve as the industry-standards, highly scalable backends for cloud infrastructure storage. They integrate seamlessly via open APIs to power multiple OpenStack components:
- Cinder: Provides persistent block storage for VMs.
- Glance: Acts as the central repository for VM images.
- Nova: Manages ephemeral root disks for compute instances.
These seamless integrations allows OpenStack users to execute instant VM booting and live migrations.
How does Ceph connect to other storage?
Ceph Storage connects to external, non-native storage systems through specialized gateways and standard network protocols. It utilizes an iSCSI gateway to expose block storage to legacy OS platforms, an NFS gateway to share filesystems with standard network clients, and S3/Swift RESTful APIs to integrate with third-party application object storage.
How does Ceph connect to FC storage?
Ceph Storage dTo connect Ceph to a Fiber Channel (FC) storage area network (SAN), you must deploy an intermediary gateway node (such as an iSCSI-to-FC bridge) or configure specific software initiators on application servers to translate the IP-based Ceph traffic into FC-compatible block devices.
How to access Ceph storage?
You can access Ceph Storage using several native and industry-standard protocols based on your infrastructure needs:
- Native Access: Use librados for direct application integration, the rbd driver for block devices, or the cephfs kernel module for file sharing.
- Object Access: Connect via standard HTTPS using Amazon S3 or OpenStack Swift APIs.
- Legacy Access: Mount shared storage via standard NFS or map drives using the iSCSI protocol.
How to backup Ceph storage?
Backing up Ceph Storage depends entirely on the storage type you are utilizing:
- For Block: Create point-in-time RBD snapshots, export them using rbd export, or set up asynchronous Ceph RBD Mirroring to a secondary cluster.
- For File: Utilize CephFS snapshots or run standard enterprise backup agents, such as rsync, directly on the mounted directory.
- For Object: Configure RGW Multi-Site Replication to automatically sync object data to a geographically isolated disaster recovery cluster.