Some lessons learned from creating and using the Ceph open-source storage system
Channel: British Computer Society Open Source Specialists
Date: 2020-06-12

Presented by Carlos Maltzahn, UC Santa Cruz, USA

In 2005 at UC Santa Cruz, Sage Weil created a fully functional parallel file system we called Ceph. In 2006 we open-sourced Ceph under the LGPLv2 license. After his graduation in 2007, Sage was able to continue working on Ceph, built a community around it, got the Ceph client accepted into the Linux kernel in 2010, achieved production readiness in 2012, founded the startup Inktank in 2012, and sold it to Red Hat in 2014 for $175m. Sage then donated $2m to UC Santa Cruz to create a structure that would help other students to have a similar career at the university as he had. In 2015 I kicked off the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS). Meanwhile, starting in 2009 I built a research program around programmable storage systems and decided to use Ceph as the primary research prototyping platform. As Ceph became more widely used, that choice gained a positive impact on the job prospects of our students, on the generality of our research results, on the funding prospects of our research, and on the pace of delivering research.
In this talk, I will report on some of the lessons learned, including how our use of Ceph as a research platform evolved and why an open-source storage system like Ceph can fundamentally change the dynamics of research and entire industries. I will end with a quick overview of the SkyhookDM project (skyhookdm.com).

Bio: Dr. Carlos Maltzahn is the founder and director of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS). Dr. Maltzahn also co-founded the Systems Research Lab, known for its cutting-edge work on programmable storage systems, big data storage & processing, scalable data management, distributed system performance management, and practical reproducible evaluation of computer systems. Carlos joined UC Santa Cruz in 2004, after five years at Netapp working on network-intermediaries and storage systems. In 2005 he co-founded and became a key mentor on Sage Weil’s Ceph project. In 2008 Carlos became a member of the computer science faculty at UC Santa Cruz and has graduated nine Ph.D. students since. Carlos graduated with a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Colorado at Boulder.