Ambedded Ceph Cluster

Ceph clusters are normally installed on many single nodes. For in order to achieve high performance and an efficient erasure coding, the overall number of nodes matters. On the other hand this makes only sense for a high capacity.
Ambedded has developed an interesting alternative: in a 1 U server enclosure eight independent nodes are integrated, each with its own processor, a disk and an M.2 flash card for cache. Each single node can be individually configured, as storage or monitoring node, this is done with a management software.
Thus with three enclosures a complete, redundant cluster van be build, having one monitoring node in each enclosure (enough for a quorum) and seven storage nodes, e.g. with 2+1 erasure coding. Then two running enclosures are sufficient to keep all data available.
Mars 500 NVMe is the high-performance U.3 NVMe evolution of its predecessor Mars400, with 8 or 24 NVMe SSDs. Both models can be combined and integrated into existing environments, which increases the flexibility but also the performance of your CEPH cluster enormously. For example, combinations of Mars400 with HDDs and Mars500 nodes are possible. The CEPH NVMe pool can even be integrated as a cache tier in front of existing HDD pools.