Skip to main content

CephBox : A Home Cloud solution

Why CephBox?​

A product must be a solution to real world problem. What is the problem :

While we have many solutions for business-critical data, personal data storage and management is often overlooked.

Cloud storage for personal use is 'expensive' and 'overkill'. External individual Hard drives and USB sticks which majority of the population uses does not have a long 'shell life', just waiting for the memories to be lost forever.

I have been struggling with storing the photos and videos that I take. Although I am not a photographer, but I like to document places, things, my life, my family, my neighbourhood. My cloud storage is running out, I get a notification every other day to upgrade the plan. I am hesitant to upgrade the plan just like every other guy.

I’ve tried the whole ‘copying stuff to USBs and multiple hard drives’ routine and to be honest I genuinely hate that process. It's very confusing and I have lost track of where I have stored what. And they have a notoriously very short shell life, especially with bitrot we are just waiting for your memories to be lost forever.

I see the same story with everyone in my family and my friends that I talk to. Just think of the social media content creators and photographers out there who is having hard time. They might need comparitively more storage but the nature of the data is similar; cold, archival, and not constantly accessed but should be easily and readily accessible when the time comes.

There are mainly 2 options currently we have ; NAS and Cloud.

Cloud storage is almost perfect, infact it is more than perfect. The important question is, it really required for personal storage? I am not going to touch the privacy part, but even from a technical or technological perspective or ecological, and economic aspects?

Our photos and videos has a very unique archival nature to it. It does not have any monetary value associated with it unless of course you sell it for the ads. All it has is emotional value which grows richer with time contrary to what happens with any other type of data.

And let's be honest, half of the photos that we are not that great. Perhaps only 30% are worth keeping and even those might not be revisited for years. So I personally think it is an overkill in respect to the high end resources that a cloud provider needs to manage for storage.

NAS is another good option. I see a large trend in the community and the industry that people are moving to NAS storage for personal use.

What is CephBox?​

The name is quite obvious isn't it? It's a ceph cluster in a BOX and it rhymes with Dropbox.

I wanted to see if Ceph can be used as a backend for a home NAS setup and develop an end to end personal data storage hybrid cloud solution.

I belive Ceph has all the potential needed for this and could be better in so many ways than the conventional NAS systems because of the unique features it has inherently. Ceph is designed to be an enterprise grade product but it has the flexibility to be molded for any type of use.

There should be a de-centralized hybrid solution for personal data storage without cutting off the benefits of cloud storage. At the same time the solution should be highly reliable with lifetime gurantee of the data.

So what's the solution we are proposing:

  • a better but cheap alternative; I would be happy if I can spent 15000Rs one time to get a 2 TB storage space for my family which I can use for 5-6 years.
  • data durability - Ceph provides 3 replica solution so we can withstand individual hard disk failures. We just need to replace the failed drives.
  • data accessibility - Object, file and block access. One storage solution for everything you can think of. (Linux of storage)
  • Archival - feature to back up the storage using Tape media servers publicly available for cheap storage (eg:amazon Glacier)

In spite of all these advantages, I rarely see Ceph being used for NAS systems. I think it is mainly due to the entry barrier and steep learning curve involved. One of the key objectives of this project is to serve as a case study, demonstrating Ceph potential as a NAS backend and encouraging wider adoption.

I have read somewhere that great innovation is creating very essential products that people don't yet know they need them 🙂

I strongly believe the problem of personal data storage and management exists in the world now, (although it maybe not that severe yet.) And majority of the world does not know there could be a better solution than that what we currently have.