§ · the case for ceph
Storage that doesn't
rent itself back to you.
Ceph is the open-source, software-defined storage system that powers CERN, the Australian
BoM, and a long list of national labs and hyperscalers you've never heard of. One cluster,
one pool of disks — object (S3-compatible), block, and file, with no per-protocol licensing.
Replication, self-healing, and rebalancing are built in. You add commodity servers, you
get more capacity. You lose a server, the cluster keeps serving.
01 You own the bytes.
No egress fees. No tiering tax. No vendor pulling the rug at renewal. The disks live in your rack — including a lot of jurisdictions where storing customer data anywhere else is a compliance fail.
02 One cluster, three protocols.
S3 (RGW), block (RBD), and POSIX file (CephFS) on the same pool of disks. Stop paying for an object store, a SAN, and an NFS appliance separately.
03 Scales linearly.
Need more? Rack a server, claim its disks, walk away. Ceph rebalances. No forklift, no migration window, no “please contact your account manager.”
Upfront (year 0) $52K
Then per year $3K
- Supermicro SSG-640P-E1CR36L 3 × server · 36-bay 4U, 2× Xeon, 256 GB ECC, 2× 25 GbE
- $36,000
- 22 TB enterprise SATA 9 × drive · Seagate Exos / WD Ultrastar class
- $3,150
- Top-of-rack switching redundant 25/100 GbE leaf pair · scales every 16 nodes
- $8,000
- Rack, PDU, cabling, install $1,500 / server allocation
- $4,500
- Hardware capex (one-time)
- $51,650
- Power, cooling, spares 5% of capex / year — typical colo & ops
- $2,583/yr
Upfront (year 0) $0
AWS S3 per year $18K
- AWS S3 Standard $0.023 / GB-month · $1K/mo
- $17,805/yr
- Google Cloud Storage Standard $0.020 / GB-month · $1K/mo
- $15,483/yr
- Azure Blob Hot (LRS) $0.0184 / GB-month · $1K/mo
- $14,244/yr
- Backblaze B2 $0.006 / GB-month · $387/mo
- $4,645/yr
§ · cumulative spend, year by year
When does Ceph pay for itself?
Break-even vs AWS 3 yr 5 mo
| Year | Ceph (cumulative) | AWS S3 (cumulative) | GCP (cumulative) | Azure (cumulative) | Δ vs AWS |
|---|
| upfront | $51,650 | $0 | $0 | $0 | +$51,650 |
| Year 1 | $54,233 | $17,805 | $15,483 | $14,244 | +$36,427 |
| Year 2 | $56,815 | $35,611 | $30,966 | $28,488 | +$21,204 |
| Year 3 | $59,398 | $53,416 | $46,449 | $42,733 | +$5,982 |
| Year 4 | $61,980 | $71,221 | $61,932 | $56,977 | −$9,241 |
| Year 5 | $64,563 | $89,027 | $77,414 | $71,221 | −$24,464 |
vs AWS S3 Standard 3 yr 5 mo
vs GCP Standard 4 years
vs Azure Blob Hot 4 yr 5 mo
At 63 TB usable, the 3-node Ceph minimum
means a higher upfront — but break-even with AWS lands at 3 yr 5 mo, and every disk you add after
that scales without touching the chassis. Ceph wins for any workload you'll
keep longer than the break-even horizon.
Assumptions and how the numbers are built
- Replication: 3× replicated pool — Ceph's safe default. Erasure-coded pools (e.g. EC 4+2) reduce raw overhead to 1.5×, cutting hardware costs by another ~50% with a small CPU and write-latency tradeoff.
- Reference server: Supermicro SSG-640P-E1CR36L (36 × 3.5" top-load bays, dual Xeon Scalable, 256 GB DDR4 ECC, dual 25 GbE, mirrored NVMe boot). Listed at $12,000 in a typical OEM channel build.
- Drives: 22 TB SATA enterprise (Seagate Exos X22 / WD Ultrastar DC HC580 class) at $350 each, list. Bulk pricing typically lands lower.
- Networking: Redundant 25/100 GbE leaf pair (e.g. Mellanox SN2100 / Arista 7050 class) at $8,000 per pair. Scales one pair per ~16 nodes.
- Minimum cluster: 3 nodes, for monitor quorum and failure-domain isolation. Below ~50 TB usable, the 3-node floor dominates the capex.
- Power & cooling: 5% of capex per year. Real colo + electricity varies widely by region — adjust to your facility.
- Cloud pricing: US-region public list, hot tier, single-region redundancy where applicable. Q1 2026.
- Not included on either side: staff cost, software licensing (Ceph itself is Apache 2.0; Sentinel is its own line item), data transfer / egress, request charges, backup-of-backup.
Ready to do this in production?
Sentinel is the operator console that makes a Ceph cluster feel like an appliance — provisioning, lifecycle, monitoring, and every storage protocol from one browser tab.