The RAID technology has been the fundamental building block for storage systems for years. It has proven successful for almost every kind of data that has been generated in the last 3 decades. But all eras must come to an end, and this time, it's RAID's turn. These systems have started showing limitations and are incapable of delivering to future storage needs. In the course of the last few years, cloud infrastructures have gained a strong momentum and are imposing new requirements on storage and challenging traditional RAID systems. In this section, we will uncover the limitations imposed by RAID systems.

The most painful thing in a RAID technology is its super-lengthy rebuild process. Disk manufacturers are packing lots of storage capacity per disk. They are now producing an extra-large capacity of disk drives at a fraction of the price. We no longer talk about 450 GB, 600 GB, or even 1 TB disks, as there is a larger capacity of disks available today. The newer enterprise disk specification offers disks up to 4 TB, 6 TB, and even 10 TB disk drives, and the capacities keep increasing year by year.

Think of an enterprise RAID-based storage system that is made up of numerous 4 TB or 6 TB disk drives. Unfortunately, when such a disk drive fails, RAID will take several hours and even up to days to repair a single failed disk. Meanwhile, if another drive fails from the same RAID group, then it would become a chaotic situation. Repairing multiple large disk drives using RAID is a cumbersome process.

The RAID system requires a few disks as hot spare disks. These are just free disks that will be used only when a disk fails; else, they will not be used for data storage. This adds extra cost to the system and increases TCO. Moreover, if you're running short of spare disks and immediately a disk fails in the RAID group, then you will face a severe problem.

RAID requires a set of identical disk drivers in a single RAID group; you would face penalties if you change the disk size, rpm, or disk type. Doing so would adversely affect the capacity and performance of your storage system. This makes RAID highly choosy about the hardware.

Also, enterprise RAID-based systems often require expensive hardware components, such as RAID controllers, which significantly increases the system cost. These RAID controllers will become single points of failure if you do not have many of them.

RAID can hit a dead end when it's not possible to grow the RAID group size, which means that there is no scale-out support. After a point, you cannot grow your RAID-based system, even though you have money. Some systems allow the addition of disk shelves but up to a very limited capacity; however, these new disk shelves put a load on the existing storage controller. So, you can gain some capacity but with a performance trade-off.

RAID can be configured with a variety of different types; the most common types are RAID5 and RAID6, which can survive the failure of one and two disks, respectively. RAID cannot ensure data reliability after a two-disk failure. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of RAID systems.

Moreover, at the time of a RAID rebuild operation, client requests are most likely to starve for I/O until the rebuild completes. Another limiting factor with RAID is that it only protects against disk failure; it cannot protect against a failure of the network, server hardware, OS, power, or other data center disasters.

After discussing RAID's drawbacks, we can come to the conclusion that we now need a system that can overcome all these drawbacks in a performance and cost-effective way. The Ceph storage system is one of the best solutions available today to address these problems. Let's see how.

For reliability, Ceph makes use of the data replication method, which means it does not use RAID, thus overcoming all the problems that can be found in a RAID-based enterprise system. Ceph is a software-defined storage, so we do not require any specialized hardware for data replication; moreover, the replication level is highly customized by means of commands, which means that the Ceph storage administrator can manage the replication factor of a minimum of one and a maximum of a higher number, totally depending on the underlying infrastructure.

In an event of one or more disk failures, Ceph's replication is a better process than RAID. When a disk drive fails, all the data that was residing on that disk at that point of time starts recovering from its peer disks. Since Ceph is a distributed system, all the data copies are scattered on the entire cluster of disks in the form of objects, such that no two object's copies should reside on the same disk and must reside in a different failure zone defined by the CRUSH map. The good part is that all the cluster disks participate in data recovery. This makes the recovery operation amazingly fast with the least performance problems. Furthermore, the recovery operation does not require any spare disks; the data is simply replicated to other Ceph disks in the cluster. Ceph uses a weighting mechanism for its disks, so different disk sizes is not a problem.

In addition to the replication method, Ceph also supports another advanced way of data reliability: using the erasure-coding technique. Erasure-coded pools require less storage space compared to replicated pools. In erasure-coding, data is recovered or regenerated algorithmically by erasure code calculation. You can use both the techniques of data availability, that is, replication as well as erasure-coding, in the same Ceph cluster but over different storage pools. We will learn more about the erasure-coding technique in the upcoming chapters.