There isn't a better open source alternative to Ceph.

However, improperly designed/architected you will end up with serious scaling issues.

Testing testing testing!

It's important to actually test things.

Yes it is and not just initial testing but at scale with full volume. ;)

The issue with Ceph isn't that it's some how deficient. It's amazing. The problem is that it's difficult to engineer correctly and hard to troubleshoot.

There is no other software, open source or otherwise that works quite as well as Ceph for providing durability and scale.

ScaleIO gets high marks for block storage performance compared to Ceph. It's not quite as durable and lacks some other features, but people seem to like it.

> The problem is that it's difficult to engineer correctly and hard to troubleshoot.

These sound like... problems with Ceph.

Sane deployment, management, and troubleshooting are critical features of any distributed system.

If they’re not there the system isn’t “ready”.

Agreed.

Personally, I feel like Inktank was pretty close and when they were acquired by Red Hat, progress seemed to slow to a crawl.

I haven't run the last couple of versions. It could be much improved. Certainly bluestore is promising for performance.

MooseFS