The constant developments in Cloud Hosting technology have allowed a lot of opportunities to explore innovative storage architecture. Take CEPH storage, for instance. It is not technically storage but an architecture that shapes Cloud Hosting architecture and makes it efficient. Developed by InkTank and now maintained by RedHat, CEPH can manage three types of storages – block storage, file storage, and object storage. It is designed to hold multitudes of data, which supports the unlimited storage capability of cloud platforms. Its enterprise version offers the ultimate reliability and efficiency of data management for websites with high data need.
Let’s look at a few prominent features of CEPH.
Replication and Erasure Coding
CEPH storage allows automatic duplication of data from one node to multiple nodes, which are servers, to simply put. Thus, data gets automatically backed up, as per your set frequency. If any of such nodes ever fail, the data can be easily retrieved from the other nodes. This creates redundancy, which makes for a great feature of Cloud Hosting, powered by CEPH and makes your site data safe against any mishaps.
However, a huge amount of storage (with redundancy and all) will require adequate storage space. This is where CEPH comes with the Erasure coding algorithm. It runs on a smart application that replicates data most compactly, so you still have ample space for actual, usable data, apart from backups. Erasure code breaks objects into data chunks and coding chunks and stores them in separate drives on the OS, thus enabling efficient storage management.
Snapshots
CEPH creates snapshots of the entire system data. You can access the snapshot and the original file in the same storage extent, and yet, when you need to edit an individual snap, you can do so without using the actual storage. For common elements between the original and the snapshot, the system will use the main storage extent, and for everything else (uncommon elements) they will have their storage extents. This makes for a great mechanism when sharing information across virtual environments.
CEPH is Self-Healing
This is one of the unique features of CEPH. Although CEPH’s architecture is highly resilient and reliable, disasters are inevitable. In case there is any failed node on the server, it automatically replaces it with a duplicate node.
Thin Provisioning
This is a very useful feature for Cloud Hosting. Unlike on a traditional platform, where separate spaces are allocated for individual tasks, CEPH uses Thin Provisioning to virtually allocate space to tasks/data/events, thus freeing up actual disk space when required.
Summing up…
With applications like CEPH, Cloud Hosting becomes a highly efficient, reliable, and high-performing environment, which is the need of today’s websites. If you are already on a cloud platform or seeking Cloud Hosting, ask your service provider for CEPH storage option and redefine your server data management processes.
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