Given that I have a number of old 64bit capable desktop machines and a collection of hard drives at home, I could have run Tahoe-LAFS like I do in work for backup purposes. In fact Tahoe works quite well for the technically capable user.
Recently I’ve decided that I need a more central location at home to store my photo collection (I love to take photos with my Canon DSLR and Panasonic LX5). Traditionally I would have just fired up git-annex to track the data and then setup a number of remotes to store the data, where one of them might be Tahoe-LAFS and the rest might be portable hard drives, remote machines etc…
I could have gone with any number of distributed storage solutions such as GlusterFS, iRODS, xrootd, Lustre or xtreemfs. I’ve worked with some of these systems in production and toyed with others. Since this is for a home system I can pick what I want and change it at will.
I probably have 2-3tb’s of data to archive and store, I also want easy access to my data so NFS or CIFS exports are required. It wouldn’t be unfeasible to acquire a few 2 or 3 terabyte drives for my old desktop machine which would effectively provide me with a 2 or 3 terabyte replicated data store. Given the amount of toying around and learning about Ceph in my spare time I would expect that Ceph would provide me with a pretty good “backend” system for storing my files and the option of “migrating my data from one machine to another machine” by adding and removing OSD’s. The handiest feature for me will be the capability of expanding and shrinking the system as I need.
There probably aren’t many people who would want to setup something like this for a home system, but it is an alternative to the usual RAID or LVM setup.
Here’s my proposed setup which I’m going to setup in the next few spare weekends that I will have.
{% img /downloads/images/ceph-home.png %}
It would be great if Ceph offered some of of parity/erasure coding instead of plain replication. I’m greedy and I want to maximise my disks that I have, I wonder how low I can go on hardware with the Ceph software.
Share!
See Also
- scientific linux 6 build environment for ceph
- installing ceph on sl6
- ceph v0 dot 48 dot 2 argonaut released
- going from replicating across osds to replicating across hosts in a ceph cluster
- ceph v0 dot 48 argonaut released