Learning Ceph - Second Edition

The next-generation architecture

Traditional storage systems lack an efficient way to managing metadata. Metadata is information (data) about the actual user payload data, including where the data will be written to and read from. Traditional storage systems maintain a central lookup table to track of their metadata. Every time a client sends a request for a read or write operation, the storage system first performs a lookup to the huge metadata table. After receiving the results it performs the client operation. For a smaller storage system, you might not notice the performance impact of this centralized bottleneck, but as storage domains grow large the performance and scalability limits of this approach become increasingly problematic. ...