[fintler]

I still see Ceph as competition to supercomputer filesystems and not really as competition to GlusterFS. For example, the design of it directly attacks the problem of centralized metadata (especially useful after the DARPA project to bring it to Lustre failed).

I was working on an unrelated project with one of the designers of Ceph (UCSC's Scott Brandt) and in conversation he also seems to concur that Ceph was really built as a replacement for PanFS or Lustre (but still may be useful for other things of course).

Using it to replace GlusterFS still seems odd to me. It feels like they're both solutions to different problems.

[noahdesu]

Recent gluster vs ceph debate at LCA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfRqpdgoiRQ

[fintler]

Nice talk, but I think I was basically trying to say that Ceph really shines when you compare it to Lustre and PanFS.

It's not a clear winner when you compare it to GlusterFS because the original design wasn't intended to replace GlusterFS (although it may do a good job of this anyway).

[stonith]

Ceph is still a very long way behind Lustre for streaming bandwidth, so to say it shines would be a little much. Lustre's weakness is in scaling to support large file counts, but in real deployments this can be mitigated by using an MDS server with a lot of grunt. Ceph can't compete with Lustre for HPC deployments until it supports RDMA, and even with that it's still going to take a long time to reach Lustre's performance (which is close to line rate at this point)