To drastically change the economy in their datacenter, a large broadcasting organization in the Netherlands searched for a cloud infrastructure for the broadcasting, streaming and storage of their varied sized media files. Fairbanks compared independently various cloud storage platforms on various hardware labels for this customer.
Fairbanks implemented OpenStack and Ceph, designed representative performance tests and executed them on several software and hardware platforms, implemented optimizations, and made comparisons with alternatives such as GlusterFS. All these comparisons yielded extreme savings in the time and cost of broadcasting huge media files. The customer selected the underlying generic hardware layer, OpenStack as the cloud and virtualization (compute) platform and GlusterFS as the cloud storage platform. In the end, the customer chose a file system storage solution (GlusterFS) because the primary media application needed a file system overhead. As block- and object-storage, Ceph couldn’t (yet) comply to this.