Server recommendations

Canonical strongly recommends using rack servers for private Ceph implementations. Software-defined storage (SDS) platforms, like Ceph, are designed to run on commodity hardware. Choosing rack servers for private cloud deployment is therefore a natural move. While blade servers are very popular for traditional virtualisation environments supported by storage area network (SAN) storage, the overall economics for those configurations tend to be very poor due to the inability to utilise commodity parts with multiple suppliers. They also dramatically limit options for storage and network configuration.