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Alternatives to Ceph for this use case
I only have experience with Ceph in the past (both normal setup and from Kubernetes with Rook). I am about to start a new project and I am wondering if there are any alternatives to Ceph these days that I should consider and that can run in Kubernetes.
Use case: regular storage, but due to the nature of the product the storage cluster would need to support reliably a high number of volumes (hundreds to thousands if the project takes off).
Also, the storage system must support both thin provisioning and volumes that can be automatically broken down into smaller parts distributed across the cluster depending on the size of the volume and the storage available on each node. i.e.: if say a volume is 50GB and the customer wants to purchase more storage to 100GB, but there isn't enough storage on the node that hosts the volume, I don't want to have to migrate the volume and things like that. With Ceph a volume can even be much larger than the total storage available on a single node.
So, is Ceph still the way to go in 2026 or is there something better/easier that you would recommend?
BTW I would mainly use block storage, but support for read-write-many volumes (shared filesystems) and object storage would be nice to have.
Comments
highendtalk
Ceph is probably the only option if you are after a unified, open-source storage solution.
block storage alone there are a few alternatives, for example https://linbit.com/software-defined-storage/ (I tried them in the past and the performance looks great, but had to drop because the volumes often go out of sync - maybe skill issues tho)
Ceph is the most reliable solution afaict.
Nothing else then Ceph, if you want something paid then maybe Nutanix storage.
https://linbit.com/linstor/ ?
Ceph is by far the best and most reliable in my experience
Theoretically there is https://longhorn.io and it's already widely used in the Kubernetes space. It has it's pros and cons comparing to Rook (Ceph).
iirc longhorn is a little better then ceph in terms of performance, would have been my best bet as well i guess
i find it pretty hard to find anything comparable to ceph, simplyblock looks good to but its expensive like a lot other similiar solutions unfortunately
i would also like to test out beegfs at some point but ceph seems to be unmatched in terms of bug fixing, user base/community and troubleshoot resources availabilty
but as performance doesnt seem to be a concern just use ceph lol @vitobotta
Thanks guys, I'll stick with Ceph then.
I have also used both Linstor and Longhorn in the past. Linstor was a bit annoying to manage and Longhorn has a history of reliability issues so I don't know if I would trust it. But both have the same problem where each replica of a volume fully resides on a node. So I'd have to migrate volumes from one node to another if I need to expand it and there is not enough free space on the current node. Ceph solves this problem due to its chunk based architecture.
Nutanix is awesome but ridiculously expensive, and this is a project we are bootstrapping ourselves with a limited budget for now.
Thanks again!