Ceph Object Storage for E-Mail

Danny Al-Gaaf will give a talk about his current project:

Most enterprise email solutions make use of traditional or shared file systems like NFS to store data, indexes and caches. Software-defined storage solutions such as Ceph have disrupted the storage market in the last few years.

For emails, object store is a logical choice as a storage backend. Ceph offers two object store backends: Rados Gateway (S3 & Swift) and native RADOS. For an email system with millions of active customers, the Rados Gateway would very likely become a bottleneck. To achieve maximum performance using parallel I/O from all clients, librados is the best option.

This talk will provide insight in what Deutsche Telekom, together with partners, is doing to move from NFS to Ceph-based storage for email. To make use of Ceph, we developed an open source library called librmb (librados mailbox) to unify email storage via librados.