Ceph Storage at CERN

Ceph and its Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS) offers a scale out storage solution for block storage (RBD), object storage (S3 and SWIFT) and filesystems (CephFS). The key technologies enabling Ceph include CRUSH, a mechanism for defining and implementing failure domains, and the mature Object Storage Daemons (OSDs), which provide a reliable storage backend via replication or erasure coding. CERN has employed Ceph for its on-prem cloud infrastructures since 2013. As of 2022, its storage group operates more than ten clusters totaling over 50 petabytes for cloud, Kubernetes, and HPC use-cases. This talk will introduce Ceph and its key concepts, and describe how CERN uses Ceph in practice. It will include recent highlights related to high-throughput particle physics data taking and SLURM storage optimization.