Educational webinars about Cephand PetaSAN
In the three parts of our Ceph seminar, our experts went into detail.
Ceph explained by experts
Starline Managing Director Dr. Tim Ganser and Chief Technology Officer Konrad Beyer hosted the exciting webinar series, which took place on three consecutive dates.
Our software expert first provided the basics, such as the structure of a Ceph cluster with OSDs (Object Storage Daemon) and MONs (Ceph Monitor Daemon) and their interaction in the network. He also explained in detail the three other core Ceph elements - Gateway (GW), Metadata (MDS) and Manager (MGR).
Later he went into the nitty gritty and talked about the software blocks used such as CRUSH, RADOS, CephFS and Librados. The protocols used (iSCSI, CIFS/SMB, NFS, S3) were also included. Last but not least, the hardware choice for dedicated nodes was on his agenda.
A coherent system
PetaSAN expert Maged Mokhtar presented important product details to the audience via screenshots or directly in a live demo and gave valuable tips on basic configuration as well as hardware system requirements in different environments (Ceph, Red Hat, SUSE). Last but not least, he addressed the topic of benchmarking in the Ceph cluster.
This expert is not only the head of the company, he is also a genuine software developer. Thus, Maged is deeply involved in Ceph and has a lot of experience in its practical application.
Drives for the practice
As an HDD expert,Rainer W. Kaese was responsible for selecting and using the drives himself. Thus, he first gave important tips regarding the use of HDDs and SSDs in a price/performance consideration. It also provided useful selection criteria when choosing which protocol to use (SAS or SATA). He also gave an insight into the pilot projects at Toshiba.
In the NTT data center (Global Data Centers EMEA, a division of NTT Ltd.), for example, a Starline installation is running with Toshiba HDDs. In the Technology Experience Labs located there, a PetaSAN installation with 220 TB has also been convincing for some time with its highly available clustered iSCSI disks. By the way, they were provided with 10 TB enterprise hard disks from Toshiba in the Ceph array.
