Overview

Ceph is a widely used distributed-storage solution. Many clusters in production environments are deployed on hard disk drivers for cost efficiency. But the random access of HDD is restricted by the seek time of the magnetic head, which causes the performance of random access to drop very severely compared with an SSD.

Open Cache Acceleration Software (Open CAS) is an open-source cache acceleration solution initiated by Intel®. By loading the modules into the kernel, the high-speed media device(s) used as cache, merge with slow devices into a new CAS device, thereby improving the overall device read and write performance of the system.

This allows us to provide a low cost and high-performance solution that takes advantage of both HDDs and SDDs.

This guide will walk you through the steps to set up HDD-based Ceph cluster with Open CAS.