Chapter 2. Planning a Cluster
Chapter 2. Planning a Cluster Planning a cluster for use with the Ceph Object Gateway involves several important considerations: Identifying use cases Selecting data durability methods Considering multi-site deployment These factors will have a significant influence when considering hardware . Consider these factors carefully before selecting hardware. 2.1. Identifying Use Cases Ceph Storage is capable of serving many different types of storage use cases. For Ceph Object Storage, the typical use cases are: Throughput-optimized: A throughput-optimized cluster seeks to ensure fast data access. Host bus adapters (HBAs), storage media with fast sequential read/write characteristics and high network bandwidth provide capability for applications such as graphics, streaming audio and streaming video. Throughput-optimized optimized clusters also consider whether write performance is a consideration. Throughput-optimized clusters that use SSDs for journaling realize substantially better write performance, which can be important for applications like storing CCTV streams. Throughput-optimized clusters should consider the throughput characteristics of a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) controller and network throughput for intensive applications such as streaming 4K video. HBA-based hardware controllers offer significant performance improvements over on-board controllers. Capacity-optimized: A capacity-optimized cluster seeks to ensure the lowest cost per terabyte of storage. Capacity-optimized clusters often use the least expensive storage media and often avoid the added expense of separate SSD journals for applications such as archiving infrequently accessed legacy financial records, old emails, etc. IOPS-optimized: An IOPS-optimized cluster seeks to provide high performance for read- and write-intensive workloads. While IOPS-optimized workloads are not as common for Ceph Object Gateways, they can be supported with SSD, Flash memory or NVMe CRUSH hierarchies. Carefully consider the storage use case(s) BEFORE considering hardware, because it can significantly impact the price and performance of the cluster. For example, if the use case is capacity-optimized and the hardware is better suited to a throughput-optimized use case, the hardware will be more expensive than necessary. Conversely, if the use case is throughput-optimized and the hardware is better suited to a capacity-optimized use case, the cluster may suffer from poor performance. Also, note that since Ceph Object Gateway supports storage policies, it is possible to create CRUSH hierarchies for ALL of the foregoing scenarios and invoke them with storage policies supported in the APIs. See Creating Data Placement Strategies for details. 2.2. Selecting Data Durability Methods Cluster design should also consider the data durability strategy. Ceph Storage uses either replication or erasure coding to ensure data durability. Replication stores one or more redundant copies of the data across failure domains in case of a hardware failure. However, redundant copies of data can become expensive at scale. For example, to store 1 petabyte of data with triple replication would require a cluster with at least 3 petabytes of storage capacity. The Erasure coding section of the Storage Strategies Guide for Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 describes how erasure coding stores data as data chunks and coding chunks. In the event of a lost data chunk, erasure coding can recover the lost data chunk with the remaining data chunks and coding chunks. Erasure coding is substantially more economical than replication. For example, using erasure coding with 8 data chunks and 3 coding chunks provides the same redundancy as 3 copies of the data. However, such an encoding scheme uses approximately 1.5x of the initial data stored compared to 3x with replication. Note ONLY the data storage pool can use erasure coding. Pools storing service data and bucket indexes use replication. 2.3. Considering Multi-site Deployment Another important aspect of designing a cluster is to determine if the cluster will be in one data center site or span multiple data center sites. Multi-site clusters benefit from geographically distributed failover and disaster recovery, such as long-term power outages, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods or other disasters. Additionally, multi-site clusters in an active-active configuration can direct client applications to the closest available cluster in the manner of content delivery networks. Placing data as close to the client as possible is increasingly important for throughput intensive workloads such as streaming 4k video. For details of multi-site clusters, see the Multi-site chapter in the Ceph Object Gateway Configuration and Administration Guide for Red Hat Ceph Storage 4. Note Red Hat recommends identifying realm, zone group and zone names BEFORE creating Ceph Storage pools. Some pool names should be pre-pended with the zone name by convention.