The use of commodity hardware

Ceph is designed to be run on commodity hardware, which gives the ability to be able to design and build a cluster without the premium demanded by traditional tier 1 storage and server vendors. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Be able to choose your own hardware that allows you to build your Ceph infrastructure to exactly match your requirements. However, one thing branded hardware does offer is compatibility testing; it's not unknown for strange exotic firmware bugs to be discovered, which can cause very confusing symptoms. A thought should be applied to whether your IT teams have the time and skills to cope with any obscure issues that may crop up with untested hardware solutions.

The use of commodity hardware also protects against the traditional fork lift upgrade model, where the upgrade of a single component often requires the complete replacement of the whole storage array. With Ceph you can replace individual components in a very granular nature, and with automatic data balancing, lengthy data migration periods are avoided. The distributed nature of Ceph means that hardware replacement or upgrades can be done during working hours without effecting service availability.