This list of Ceph alternatives can provide a good starting point for better understanding what's available and the issues to look for during the storage decision-making process.
Public and private organizations have widely adopted the Ceph distributed storage platform to support their data-driven workloads. But some organizations need to consider Ceph alternatives for their needs.
Ceph offers a flexible, highly scalable platform that can handle data at petabyte or even exabyte scale. Because Ceph is open source and free, organizations can reduce complex and expensive licensing issues. Ceph's inherent complexity, however, means IT teams that don't have the necessary expertise on staff can have a difficult time deploying and managing it. The platform also requires a comprehensive network. Even without these challenges, Ceph might not be suited to certain workloads.
The following sections provide a brief overview of five open source Ceph alternatives, unranked and in alphabetical order. Enterprises must consider a range of factors, such as the amount of data, type of workloads, available infrastructure and in-house expertise.
Gluster
The Gluster scalable network file system is free and open source. It can use commodity hardware to create large, distributed storage options. The platform aggregates storage resources into a single global namespace, making it possible to scale to petabytes.
Gluster is compatible with Portable OS Interface (POSIX); supports standard protocols, such as NFS and SMB; and can use any on-disk file system that supports extended attributes. It can also handle multiple volume types, such as Distributed Glusterfs Volume or Replicated Glusterfs Volume. It includes important data protection features, including snapshots, quotas, georeplication and bit rot detection.
Gluster is often compared to Ceph because it also offers a powerful distributed storage system. Gluster, however, is a block-based storage platform, while Ceph is object-based. Ceph also includes native support for file and block storage. Yet, Gluster has a reputation for being easier to deploy, manage and use than Ceph.
As for performance, much depends on storage type, data volumes, file size, workload requirements and other factors. IT teams that evaluate Ceph and Ceph alternatives should consider the circumstances and environments in which they plan to implement their file systems.
Ceph's inherent complexity means IT teams that don't have the necessary expertise on staff can have a difficult time deploying and managing it.
HDFS
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is the primary storage management system used in Apache Hadoop clusters. The distributed file system is written in Java and designed to run on commodity hardware. The HDFS architecture enables the rapid transfer of data between compute nodes and provides applications with high-throughput access to their data.
HDFS can handle large data sets and file sizes. It can support structured, semistructured and unstructured data. The system is highly scalable, configurable and fault-tolerant, with features such as fault detection and automatic recovery. It is also portable across hardware platforms and OSes.
HDFS can be cost-effective for working with large data sets. Organizations can deploy it on low-cost hardware and scale from megabytes to petabytes, while providing high throughput for streaming data access. HDFS is primarily suited to a write-once, read-many access model, however. Once a file is written and closed, it can be changed only through appends and truncates.
This approach helps simplify data coherency and accelerate throughput, making it well suited to MapReduce or web crawler applications. But it is not the best fit for workloads that require continuous reads/writes, which Ceph can better support. As one of the Ceph alternatives, though, HDFS has the advantage of processing data nearer to where it is stored and offers high portability and fast recovery capabilities.
Lustre
The Lustre cluster storage architecture includes an object-based parallel file system. The file system supports a range of Linux distributions and provides a POSIX-compliant Unix file system interface. Lustre is often used for supercomputers and high-performance computing clusters. It can support tens of thousands of clients and scale up to petabytes. It supports hundreds of gigabytes per second of I/O throughput.
Lustre aggregates storage capacity and throughput, both of which can be easily scaled by adding servers. The platform supports a variety of high-performing networks and can run on different CPU architectures and mixed-endian clusters.
Organizations that plan large-scale deployments should consider Lustre. The platform delivers strong performance and provides important enterprise features, such as high availability, disaster recovery, security protections and performance monitoring.
Lustre is a parallel file system, unlike Ceph, which is a standard distributed file system. A parallel file system often comes with increased complexity and administrative overhead, making it a challenge to maintain, particularly when it comes to upgrades. Lustre is also geared toward large-scale deployments and might not be suited for smaller efforts. Ceph offers more flexibility, especially with its support for object, block and file storage.
MinIO
The MinIO enterprise-class object storage platform can run on any public or private cloud, as well as in edge environments. It is based on a cloud-native design that is compatible with the S3 API. It also provides native support for Kubernetes and can run on multiple hardware architectures, ranging from Arm-based embedded systems to high-end x64 servers.
MinIO provides the scalability and performance needed to support AI workloads, promising up to 325 gibibytes per second read performance and 165 GiBps write performance when running on 32 nodes of NVMe drives and a 100 Gigabit Ethernet network, according to the vendor. MinIO also includes a variety of data protections, including replication, encryption, versioning, object immutability, and identity and access management.
MinIO focuses solely on cloud-native object storage. It is geared toward modern applications, as evidenced by its integration with Kubernetes. On the other hand, Ceph supports object, block and file storage, offering organizations greater flexibility. MinIO might be better suited to organizations that run only object-based S3 workloads.
As one of the Ceph alternatives, MinIO is generally considered simpler to deploy and maintain, although some users have reported difficulty with their initial installations and their Kubernetes deployments. Some have also noted that the documentation could be improved.
ZFS
The ZFS file system and logical file manager uses storage pools to manage physical storage across enterprise-class computing systems. ZFS was created by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010. ZFS is designed to run on a single server that can support hundreds or thousands of attached storage drives.
The ZFS platform is known for its data integrity and scalability, along with features such as replication, deduplication, compression, cloning and other data protections. The open source version of ZFS, OpenZFS, is based on the same source code as ZFS. OpenZFS is available for free, while ZFS is built into the Oracle Solaris OS.
ZFS runs on a single server, unlike a distributed file system. Consequently, the server requires substantial memory for caching and managing metadata. ZFS can be complicated to use and manage, although it is still generally considered to be easier to use than Ceph.
Some debate surrounds using ZFS with Linux because of licensing concerns. Fortunately, OpenZFS distributions are available for several Linux systems, as well as for OSes such as macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Windows. Ceph is generally considered more flexible, scalable and feature-rich than ZFS.
Robert Sheldon is a freelance technology writer. He has written numerous books, articles and training materials on a wide range of topics, including big data, generative AI, 5D memory crystals, the dark web and the 11th dimension.
