Hardware choices affect ceph distributed storage cost and speed
Seeking Cost-Optimal Infrastructure Size for Distributed Filesystems: A Ceph Case Study
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingPerformance
Summary
Distributed filesystems store data across many computers but figuring out how changes in hardware affect their speed isn't simple. The authors studied Ceph, a popular distributed filesystem, to see how CPU cores, memory, and disk speed impact its performance. They found that reducing hardware doesn't always slow down the system as much as expected. Their approach helps design cheaper distributed storage that still works well.
What this means in practice
- •For data center operators: Optimize server hardware in distributed storage to reduce costs without sacrificing expected performance.
- •For cloud infrastructure engineers: Tune Ceph cluster configurations to balance hardware resource allocation and throughput for cost-effective cloud storage.
Authors
Niccolo Tosato, Isac Pasianotto, Ruggero Lot, Stefano Cozzini
Abstract
Distributed Filesystems (DFS) are a crucial component of modern computing environments, and their performance is critical to the success of all the facilities that rely on them. However, predicting the DFS I/O performance solely based on the storage system hardware is not trivial. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting an empirical method that tries to quantitatively assess how hardware configuration choices influence the performance of a DFS using Ceph as a case study. We investigate the influence of three hardware parameters-number of CPU cores, amount of RAM, and disk bandwidth. To control these variables, we relied on the Linux hotplug interface and Cgroups, avoiding additional software overhead. Our results reveal that for the analyzed workloads, decreasing hardware resources does not always yield proportional performance losses. This method offers practical insights for designing cost-effective distributed storage systems, remaining general enough to be applied to other filesystems.