A common use case for Ceph is to store mail as objects using the S3 API. Although most mail servers do not yet support such a storage backend, deploying them on Ceph block devices is a beneficial first step. The disk can be resized live, while the mail server is running, and will remain available even when a machine goes down. In the following example it gains ~100GB every 30 seconds:
$ df -h /data/bluemind Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/rbd2 1.9T 196M 1.9T 1% /data/bluemind $ sleep 30 ; df -h /data/bluemind Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/rbd2 2.0T 199M 2.0T 1% /data/bluemind
When the mail system is upgraded to a S3 capable mail storage backend, it will be able to use the Ceph S3 API right away: Ceph uses the same underlying servers for both purposes ( block and object storage ).
Continue reading “Resizeable and resilient mail storage with Ceph”