Ceph: Designing and Implementing Scalable Storage Systems

Scale-up versus scale-out

When you are building up a storage infrastructure, scalability is one of the most important design aspects. The storage solution that you have chosen for your infrastructure should be scalable enough to accommodate your future data needs. Usually, a storage system starts with small to medium capacity and grows gradually into a large storage solution.

Traditional storage systems were based on scale-up design and were limited by a certain storage capacity. If you try to expand these storage systems over a certain limit, you might need to compromise the performance, reliability, and availability. The scale-up design methodology for storage involves adding disk resources to the existing controller systems, which becomes ...