For the Paris summit, the OpenCrowbar team delivered a PackStack demo that leveraged Crowbar’s ability to create a OpenStack ready state environment.  For the Vancouver summit, we did something even bigger: we updated the OpenCrowbar Ceph workload.

Ceph is the leading open source block storage back-end for OpenStack; however, it’s tricky to install and few vendors invest the effort to hardware optimize their configuration.  Like any foundation layer, configuration or performance errors in the storage layer will impact the entire system.  Further, the Ceph infrastructure needs to be built before OpenStack is installed.

OpenCrowbar was designed to deploy platforms like Ceph.  It has detailed knowledge of the physical infrastructure and sufficient orchestration to synchronize Ceph Mon cluster bring-up.

We are only at the start of the Ceph install journey.  Today, you can use the open source components to bring up a Ceph cluster in a reliable way that works across hardware vendors.  Much remains to optimize and tune this configuration to take advantage of SSDs, non-Centos environments and more.

We’d love to work with you to tune and extend this workload!  Please join us in the OpenCrowbar community.