This article is more than 1 year old

Yahoo! adopts! Ceph! to! underpin! Flickr!, plans! storage-as-a-service! service!

Purple Palace says it will have hundreds of software-defined petabytes by year's end

Strap yourself in, storage-buyers: those pushing a software-defined approach and/or object storage will soon be telling you that their wares are ready for anything because Yahoo!'s exascale photo storage service has re-platformed itself on Ceph. The Purple Palace also says it will soon have hundreds of petabytes under software-defined control and plans a storage-as-a-service service.

Ceph is a Red-Hat-controlled, but licensed under the Lesser Gnu Public License and therefore permits copying and modification to the extend that the likes of Suse happily offers it.

Flickr's decision to adopt the software, explained by Yahoo!s Narayan P.P.S, Sambit Samal and Satheesh Nanniyur in a Tuesday post came about after it evaluated the OpenStack Swift storage stack and commercial offerings. Ceph came out on top “... because it enables consolidation of storage tiers for Object, Block, and File with inherent architectural support.”

The LGPL also means Yahoo! can tweak the tech as required, which is handy given it operates at colossal scale. Indeed, the post we've linked to above says the company has created a Cloud Object Store (COS) based on Ceph and finds it works best when assembled into three-petabyte clusters that are then assembled into superclusters.

Flickr has been moved onto this architecture and the company now plans to move “hundreds” of petabytes onto the platform to support its Mail services and the Tumblr blogging platform.

The post also says that “in 2015, we plan to offer COS as a multi-tenant hosted service.”

Which is rather interesting as Yahoo!'s various rejuvenation attempts haven't yet considered business cloud services. Exascale storage-as-a-service would take the Purple Palace into territory occupied by the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google.

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like