Ceph storage vs. hardwere storage

I’m thinking of making a backup target for multiple people with many diferent backup jobs.

In you’re opinion what makes more sense and is easier to manage and mantain in the long term. A ceph cluster or a hardwere solution for instance premade from a vendor?

I was thinking of starting small and scailing as needed.
But I would have to learn how to manage the cluster or server in any case so it’s not like I’m an expert in eather :stuck_out_tongue:

Could you guys help me decide on a solution…
Pros and Cons or something :slight_smile:

You will need hardware for a ceph cluster. It may call itself software defined storage, but it runs on HDDs and SSDs and not out of thin air. A cluster is 3+ servers.

Your typical NAS scales well into 250+TB without any clustering needed. So most people prefer single server NAS over clustering because it’s way cheaper and way faster.

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+1 for a single server.

Get a cheap Synology unit for replication in case the main machine dies.

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This seems to be the big sell of Truenas Scale. You can build a single server and add more servers later to make a gluster cluster. You’d still need to configure/maintain the server manually, but it’s pretty straightforward.

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Except clustering is still only for “early adopters”. Most of Scale is. So be careful with valuable data. Check back in 2-3 years where Scale may come close to Core levels of maturity.

Sales pitch for Scale is Truecharts catalog for point&click containers.

edit: And OP is talking about Ceph…well, Ceph is many things, but neither fast nor easy to run. But I would trust Ceph with my data while I had my troublesome and dangerous experiences with Scale and won’t touch it in the coming years. iX Systems lost a lot of trust they earned with TrueNAS Core.

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Thanks guys that’s really informative.
And I guess If the data grows to a bigger scale than a single server I can scale later. And I probably don’t need another copy of the data if this is a 3rd copy of data or should I do that as well.
I haven’t worked with trueNAS yet so synology because I know them the most.

But I did have some strange problem on one of the old ones I have… The thing just forgot the permissions for all the users… I could connect and see everything as admin for instance but I couldn’t even update, without it giving me a permissions error…
Still have it sitting In a corner because I didn’t want to delete everything on it but haven’t had the time to look into the problem :stuck_out_tongue:

Ideally you’ll have 3 copies across at least two different devices with one off-site. That’s what we call the 3-2-1 rule.

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