Looking beyond the default - Ceph
If you look carefully at the comparison overview mentioned previously, you will find Ceph! It is not just a driver that has to be installed and configured as a backend for Cinder. It is standard open source distributed storage. Ceph can be used for object storage through its S3 API as well as the Swift API. If you intend to gather all the pieces from the object and network block devices, you should consider Ceph. Moreover, it can also expose the filesystem interface, which makes it possible to use it as a file share. The concept of Ceph as a scalable storage solution is almost the same as Swift that replicates data across the commodity storage nodes, but that's not all. Ceph is a good data consolidator that enables you to grab both the object, block and files share storages in a single system. You can even use it as a backend to glance for storing images.
Let's have a look at the architecture of Ceph:
The core of Ceph is the reliable autonomic distributed...
