Chapter 9. Additional Use Cases

When developing storage strategies, the procedure for Creating a Realm ensured that the cluster is already configured to use multi-site with its own realm, master zone group and master zone.

A typical production cluster will have a secondary zone with its own Ceph Storage Cluster in a separate physical location to act as a backup in the event of a disaster. To set up a secondary zone, repeat the procedures in this guide. Generally, the secondary zone should have the same hardware configuration and sizing as the master zone. See Configuring a Secondary Zone for additional details.

Adding a secondary zone adds Failover and Disaster Recovery capabilities to the cluster.

If the Ceph Object Gateway and Ceph Storage Cluster replaces a file system-based storage solution, consider using Ceph’s NFS-Ganesha solution to migrate data from the file system into Ceph Object Gateway.

See Exporting the Namespace to NFS-Ganesha chapter in the Ceph Object Gateway Configuration and Administration Guide.

Traditional web hosting sometimes involves setting up a web server for each website, which can use resources inefficiently when content does not change dynamically.

Ceph Object Gateway can host static web sites in S3 buckets—​that is, sites that do not use server-side services like PHP, servlets, databases, nodejs and the like. This approach is substantially more economical than setting up VMs with web servers for each site.

See Configuring Gateways for Static Web Hosting for additional details.

Organizations deploying Ceph Object Gateway for their users and applications may choose to use Light-weight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to authenticate with the Ceph Object Gateway in lieu of creating Ceph Object Gateway users.

Using LDAP/AD means that Ceph Object Gateway can integrate with an organizations LDAP/AD single sign-on initiatives.

For details, see the Ceph Object Gateway with LDAP/AD Guide for Red Hat Ceph Storage 4.

When deploying the Ceph Object Gateway in lieu of OpenStack Swift, it is possible to configure the gateway to use OpenStack Keystone to authenticate users in lieu of creating Ceph Object Gateway users.

For details, see the Using Keystone to Authenticate Ceph Object Gateway Users guide for Red Hat Ceph Storage 4.