Cephalocon 2019

This talk will present a top down view on how Ceph is operated within the large scale research environment of CERN. Scientists at CERN use Ceph in an increasing variety of ways, from block storage for OpenStack to HPC filesystems to S3 object storage. Operating this ~20PB of infrastructure requires continuous measurement and performance tuning to keep the infrastructure running optimally. In this area, we will present our experience tuning and scaling RBD and CephFS, with the latter culminating in the first appearance of Ceph in the IO-500 list. On the operations side, we will present our approach to commissioning and decommissioning hardware, demonstrating some advanced features such as the Ceph balancer. We will conclude by presenting what is upcoming for storage in general at CERN, and present different scenarios how Ceph might play a role in that story.