We’ve been running Rook-Ceph in production across multiple client environments. In one example, we built a setup with 8 refurbished Dell servers (128GB RAM, 8–14 JBOD disks each) over 10G networking. It supports geo-replication between sites and has been stable for over 2 years. Total hardware cost was under $100k.

Rook simplifies the operational overhead of Ceph quite a lot, especially in Kubernetes-native stacks. For teams with large data and HA requirements, it's been a solid on-prem alternative. SLA-backed managed services are also becoming more common, which helps reduce the operational burden even further.