In the data storage world, there are many choices other than Ceph. What sets Ceph apart is the simplicity of Ceph's cluster management and the significant cost reduction by leveraging commodity hardware and the absence of a vendor license lock-in. Ceph provides all these features without compromising on any enterprise-class feature such as performance, reliability, and scalability.

Proxmox recently released Version 3.2 of the hypervisor integrated with a Ceph API, allowing users to manage a full Ceph cluster using the Proxmox GUI. Now Proxmox and Ceph can actually coexist on the same node, thus reducing management overhead. The following screenshot shows the integration of Ceph in the Proxmox GUI:

Without the Proxmox GUI, the only way to manage a Ceph cluster is through the CLI. There is a list of Ceph commands at the end of this chapter in The Ceph command list section.

With Ceph's architecture, a user talks to disk drives or OSDs when directly requesting for data in the...