Ceph is a much larger, more generalized project. It was designed, first, to provide highly-scalable storage solutions on commodity hardware. In more recent years, it had tried to position itself as a software-defined storage solution. In a number of ways, it is. However, it was built back in the days of real, physical, defined and deployed everything. That doesn't translate well into the modern cluster era where everything is dynamic. It defines components primarily by IP address. Its clustering technology is old, very complicated, and hopelessly intertwined with the storage stack as a whole. This is not to say it doesn't work or is a bad solution... it does work, and it is implemented by many truly enormous, production-grade clusters. Its main problem is that it just doesn't fit into a modern, container-oriented, cloud-native-oriented, dynamic cluster.
Torus is, well, brand new. It comes at the problem from a different perspective, and with different tools. For one, it leverages the clustering tools of etcd. It cannot be overstated how important this abstraction is. etcd _handles_ consistency. It _handles_ locking. It handles these features in a way that only truly specialized pieces of software can do. It makes a huge swathe of logic unnecessary, because it is already implemented as primitives in etcd. That means what is left is the business logic of storing bits in ways which are accessible, redundant, scalable, and performant. While this is no small feat, being able to assume and trust the consistency of your metadata makes the storage logic much easier. It allows abstracted and complex storage profiles to be overlayed onto a common set of manipulations. It allows endpoints and stores themselves to be abstracted and proxied (Ceph does this, too, but they had to roll their own, and as a result, it is not nearly so flexible). There are many other differences in the details, but primarily, while they're both providing scalable, redundant block storage, Torus is built for the modern cluster. On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 6:48 PM Jeffrey Ollie <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 3:54 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> I'm glad you're interested, and welcome giving it a try and finding bugs, >> but it's also a brand new prototype project, so don't expect too much from >> it. ;) PXE booting is within scope for what it might be able to help you >> with, though. >> > > So how does this compare to Ceph? From what I've read so far it looks like > Torus is competing feature-wise with a Ceph cluster that's providing RADOS > block devices. Just curious where Torus is going to differentiate itself. > > > -- > Jeff Ollie > > -- Seán C McCord CyCore Systems, Inc +1 888 240 0308
