Sardina Systems delivers innovation and cost-effectiveness, blending open source and commercial solutions. FishOS Ceph-based backup cut costs by 24% for GRASS MERKUR, offering cutting-edge technology at a competitive price.
The Importance of Backup
Data backup is crucial for any business, safeguarding against data loss and cyberattacks. It reduces downtime and facilitates disaster recovery, ensuring business continuity. Some companies mistakenly view backup as optional, but it is, in fact, a fundamental element of business protection. Without a reliable backup solution, businesses risk significant financial and reputational damage.
FishOS Ceph: The Optimal Storage Solution
While the FishOS cloud platform is compatible with various storage options, at Sardina Systems, we believe that Ceph stands out as the optimal solution. Our extensive experience in managing cloud infrastructures and storage solutions underscores this belief. Ceph’s versatility and ease of integration make it ideal for various tasks, particularly backup.
Ceph’s capabilities include:
- No Single Point of Failure: Data is distributed across multiple nodes, enhancing system reliability and eliminating a single point of failure.
- Automatic Management: Ceph automatically balances loads and restores data, reducing the need for manual intervention.
- Unified Storage: The ability to use the same cluster for object and block storage simplifies management and reduces costs.
- Flexible Scale-Out Architecture: With compatibility across nearly all hardware vendors, Ceph gains the flexibility for seamless integration.
- Cost Efficiency: Open source license covers the needs of any storage type with a single solution
Veeam Backup on FishOS Ceph
Veeam Backup is a data protection solution designed to ensure the integrity and availability of business-critical data. It offers advanced backup, recovery, and replication features for virtual, physical, and cloud-based workloads.
GRASS-MERKUR, an innovative IT service company based in Germany, provides a wide range of services including Data Center Services, Consulting, and Software Development. The company operates its own ISO 27001-certified data center in Hanover, offering colocation, managed, and cloud solutions.
As part of its offerings, GRASS-MERKUR provides a cost-effective and reliable backup solution using Veeam Backup with FishOS Ceph. This alternative contrasts with more expensive options, leveraging Veeam’s native support for RADOS Block Device (RBD) within FishOS Ceph. To ensure a seamless and effective backup environment, we conducted comprehensive testing.
Implementation of the First Use Case
In the GRASS MERKUR use case, the deployment of a Ceph cluster demonstrates the flexibility and robustness of distributed storage solutions in high-capacity environments. Below, we explore the technical aspects of this implementation, focusing on the architecture and storage efficiency.
The first step involved deploying a Ceph cluster using FishOS Ceph, configured with RADOS Block Devices (RBD) as the storage backend. The cluster comprises 12 hosts, each equipped with twelve 8 TB rotational drives (7,200 rpm) for data storage and two 1.7 TB NVMe drives dedicated to the Ceph’s journal. This setup provides a total raw storage capacity of 1.1 PB.
We employed an erasure coding scheme of 6+3 to optimize storage efficiency, where 6 blocks store the original data and 3 blocks provide data protection. This approach provides 67% storage efficiency, with additional 10% overhead for Ceph OSD, resulting in an effective usable space of 691.2 TiB.
GRASS-MERKUR then configured Veeam Backup & Replication to use the Ceph RBDs as the target backup repository. This setup involved mapping the RBD volumes to the Veeam backup servers, allowing them to function as block devices ready to store backup data.
The erasure coding was optimized with a 6+3 setup to balance storage efficiency and data durability. Replication settings within Ceph were also fine-tuned to ensure data availability across the distributed storage nodes.
Testing
During the implementation of the Veeam and Ceph RBD solution, we conducted key tests for Erasure Coding (EC) Pool. These tests evaluated its performance characteristics for 32 G and 1 T volumes.
Performance testing with random read-only workloads showed that the storage cluster achieved 36,500 IOPS on small-size data blocks (4k) with Linux kernel cache utilization and 5,534 IOPS on larger volumes where cache would be insufficient to affect performance. Larger data blocks (2 MiB) demonstrated up to 2,212 MiB/s bandwidth with 1,106 IOPS.
Mixed Read/Write (R/W) workloads showed up to 2,189 IOPS in both directions with small blocks. With larger blocks, it handled 516 IOPS bi-directionally and achieved 1,030 MiB/s of bandwidth. Random writes showed up to 3,700 IOPS on small blocks and 1,120 MiB/s of bandwidth and 560 IOPS on large blocks (2 MiB).
Cost-Efficient Backup with FishOS Ceph
Deploying Veeam with FishOS using Ceph’s API component is a swift and seamless process, typically making the system operational within a day. This combination has proven to be more cost-effective than most software-defined storage solutions, particularly for large-scale systems.
One of the key advantages of using FishOS Ceph for backup is its cost efficiency, offering approximately 24% savings per core compared to other Ceph providers. This is particularly notable for systems with substantial storage requirements, such as the 1.1 PB raw storage (691.2 TiB of effective usable space) in the GRASS MERKUR case.
GRASS MERKUR’s adoption of Veeam Backup on FishOS Ceph highlights the significant benefits of this pairing. By leveraging Ceph’s advanced storage capabilities and Veeam’s robust backup features, the system provider achieved a highly economical, efficient, and reliable backup solution.