Building a Petabyte-Scale Video Archive with Fixed-Cost Ceph

When you’re managing massive video archives, public cloud storage becomes a financial nightmare with unpredictable egress fees and scaling costs. Building petabyte-scale video archives with Ceph on OpenMetal gives you fixed monthly costs, generous egress allowances, and the technical advantages of erasure coding, delivering nearly double the usable storage capacity compared to traditional replication while maintaining high availability for your media assets.

Video content dominates today’s digital world, and if you’re responsible for storing and managing vast video archives, you’ve probably experienced the sticker shock of public cloud storage bills. Whether you’re dealing with broadcast media, surveillance footage, training materials, or user-generated content, video files create unique storage challenges that demand a different approach than typical enterprise data.

The problem isn’t just the size of video files, it’s the unpredictable cost structure of public cloud providers and the technical limitations that come with traditional storage approaches. When you need to retrieve video content for editing, distribution, or compliance purposes, those egress fees can quickly spiral into budget-breaking expenses.

The Public Cloud Video Storage Problem

Public cloud providers market themselves as cost-effective for video storage, but the reality becomes apparent when you start scaling. Video files are huge, and more are being created every day as video becomes an even more popular content medium. The initial storage costs might seem reasonable, but retrieving that content tells a different story.

Most public cloud providers charge significant egress fees – often $0.08 to $0.12 per gigabyte – for data retrieval. When you’re dealing with 4K video files that can easily exceed 100GB per hour of footage, those costs accumulate rapidly. A single day of retrieving archived content for a large production can result in thousands of dollars in unexpected charges.

Beyond cost predictability, public cloud storage presents technical limitations for video workloads. The shared infrastructure means inconsistent performance during peak usage periods, and you’re locked into proprietary APIs that limit your flexibility for integrating with existing Media Asset Management (MAM) systems.

Why Ceph Works for Video Archives

Ceph’s distributed architecture addresses the fundamental challenges of video storage through three key advantages that align perfectly with media workflows.

S3-Compatible API Integration

Ceph’s RADOS Gateway (RGW) provides an S3-compatible API that integrates seamlessly with existing Media Asset Management systems. This means you can migrate from public cloud storage without rebuilding your entire workflow infrastructure. Your editing suites, transcoding pipelines, and content distribution networks can continue using familiar S3 APIs while benefiting from the cost advantages and performance improvements of a dedicated Ceph cluster.

High Throughput Through Distributed Architecture

Video streaming and editing require sustained high throughput, especially when multiple users access large files simultaneously. Ceph’s distributed architecture spreads data across multiple drives and servers, allowing parallel reads that can deliver the bandwidth necessary for 4K and 8K video workflows. Unlike traditional storage arrays with bottlenecks at the controller level, Ceph scales throughput linearly as you add more storage nodes.

Massive Scalability

Video archives grow continuously, and Ceph can scale to dozens of petabytes without architectural limitations. As your storage needs expand, you simply add more storage servers to the cluster, and Ceph automatically redistributes data for optimal performance and capacity utilization.

The Technical Advantage of Erasure Coding

Traditional storage systems rely on full replication, typically storing three copies of every file, which means only 33% of your raw storage capacity is usable. Erasure coding is a huge technical and cost advantage that changes this equation dramatically.

With erasure coding, data is mathematically split into chunks with additional parity information, allowing reconstruction even if multiple drives fail. Using erasure coding instead of standard 3x replication can nearly double the usable storage capacity of your hardware. For example, a 17+3 erasure coding scheme provides approximately 85% usable capacity while tolerating up to three simultaneous drive failures.

For video archives, this efficiency gain translates directly to cost savings. If you need 500TB of usable storage, traditional replication requires 1.5PB of raw capacity, while erasure coding achieves the same protection with approximately 590TB of raw capacity. This level of efficiency makes private cloud storage cost-competitive with public cloud while providing superior control and predictability.

OpenMetal’s Fixed-Cost Advantage

The most significant advantage for video archive infrastructure isn’t just technical, it’s financial predictability. OpenMetal provides Ceph clusters at a fixed monthly cost, eliminating the uncertainty that plagues public cloud storage budgets. You’ll know exactly what you’re paying each month with no surprises, and you can lock in your price for up to 5 years, providing long-term budget stability that’s impossible with public cloud providers.

Generous Egress Allowances

OpenMetal includes a very generous amount of egress with each tier, and if you do exceed the included egress allotment, additional bandwidth costs only $375 per extra Gbps which translates to around 180TB of data transfer. This pricing structure is far lower than other providers and eliminates the per-gigabyte fees that make public cloud storage unpredictable for video workloads.

95th Percentile Egress Model

OpenMetal’s 95th percentile egress model means you can retrieve and stream video footage without worrying about huge per-gigabyte egress fees. This billing approach measures your bandwidth usage over time and discards the top 5% of usage spikes, so you’re billed only for typical usage patterns, not occasional peaks. For video workflows that often experience bursts during content releases or production deadlines, this model provides the freedom to access your data without financial penalties.

Hardware Architecture for Video Workloads

The storage infrastructure supporting your video archive needs to balance high-capacity storage with fast access for active content. OpenMetal’s Storage Large servers are specifically designed for this hybrid approach.

NVMe and HDD Hybrid Configuration

Each storage server includes both Intel Xeon CPUs, DDR4 RAM, high-performance NVMe SSDs and high-capacity HDDs, providing both excellent I/O performance and massive storage capacity. The NVMe drives serve as accelerators for metadata operations and frequently accessed content, while HDDs provide cost-effective bulk storage for the archive.

Performance Specifications

NVMe drives connect directly over PCIe and can achieve orders of magnitude higher input/output operations per second (IOPS) than spinning disks. Enterprise NVMe drives can exceed 1.5 million IOPS, whereas a typical 7,200 RPM HDD maxes out around 400 IOPS. In sequential throughput, critical for video streaming, NVMe can be 20–25× faster than HDD, with one test showing an NVMe M.2 drive delivering 25× the read speed of a 2TB enterprise HDD.

Network Infrastructure

Each server includes public network uplinks of 1 or 2 Gbps and high-bandwidth internal networking (20 Gbps), which is critical for clustering and feeding data to users at high rates. This network capacity ensures that your video content can be delivered at the speeds necessary for real-time streaming and editing workflows.

Real-World Video Archive Architecture

Building a petabyte-scale video archive with Ceph involves strategic placement of content across storage tiers to optimize both cost and performance. Here’s how a typical implementation works in practice.

Tiered Storage Strategy

The NVMe tier in Storage Large servers can handle random reads/writes (such as database queries or metadata lookups) with blazing speed, while the HDD tier provides massive storage capacity at lower cost per TB for bulk data. For video archives, this translates to storing actively accessed content on NVMe-backed pools for immediate retrieval, while archival content resides on HDD-backed pools with erasure coding.

Your MAM system can implement automated tiering policies, promoting frequently accessed videos to the high-performance tier and aging out content to the cost-effective archive tier based on access patterns. This ensures optimal performance for active content while minimizing storage costs for long-term archives.

Cluster Scaling Example

A dedicated object storage deployment consisting of 20 Large v4 storage servers populated with high-capacity HDDs can provide on the order of 2.7 PiB of usable storage (~3.2 PiB raw) at 85% utilization. With a 17+3 erasure coding configuration, this cluster can tolerate the failure of up to 3 drives or nodes without data loss while maintaining cost-effective storage density.

Professional Support and Expertise

Managing a petabyte-scale storage cluster requires specialized knowledge, and OpenMetal’s team brings extensive hands-on experience to your implementation. OpenMetal’s team uses Ceph internally and has lots of experience setting it up and optimizing it, so you can lean on that experience to ensure your storage is configured for optimal performance.

Customers get 1-1 support through their own dedicated Slack channel and can contact engineers and team members at any time. This level of access ensures that performance issues, scaling questions, or configuration optimizations can be addressed quickly by experts who understand both Ceph and video workflow requirements.

This support model contrasts sharply with public cloud providers, where you’re often left troubleshooting performance issues without direct access to the engineers who designed the underlying infrastructure.

Implementation Considerations

When planning your video archive migration to Ceph, several architectural decisions will impact both performance and cost-effectiveness.

Choosing Replication vs. Erasure Coding

For maximum usable space, erasure coding provides significant disk space savings. While traditional 3x replication uses only 33% of raw capacity, erasure coding schemes like 17+3 provide approximately 85% efficiency. For video archives where storage capacity directly impacts costs, this efficiency gain is substantial.

However, consider your specific reliability requirements. Data center grade SATA SSD and NVMe drives have a mean time between failures of 2 million hours, roughly 6 times more reliable than traditional HDDs. This improved reliability makes more efficient coding schemes viable for many video archive use cases.

Network Bandwidth Planning

Video content retrieval patterns vary significantly based on your specific use case. Live streaming archives require consistent high bandwidth, while surveillance footage might have sporadic access patterns with occasional high-volume retrieval during investigations. Understanding your access patterns helps optimize both storage placement and network capacity planning.

Integration with Existing Workflows

The S3-compatible API ensures compatibility with existing tools, but consider how metadata management will work within your architecture. Ceph’s metadata management capabilities can support complex video asset workflows, but integration with your MAM system should be planned during the initial design phase.

Cost Comparison and ROI

The financial case for private cloud video storage becomes compelling when you examine total cost of ownership over a multi-year period. Public cloud storage appears inexpensive initially, but egress fees, API charges, and premium features for high-performance access quickly accumulate.

With OpenMetal’s fixed pricing model, a petabyte of video storage with generous egress allowances costs a predictable monthly amount, regardless of how frequently you access your content. This predictability enables accurate budget planning and eliminates the fear of unexpected bills that can result from viral content or emergency content retrieval.

The ability to lock in pricing for up to 5 years provides additional protection against inflation and market volatility, something impossible with public cloud providers who regularly adjust pricing structures.

Future-Proofing Your Video Archive

Video technology continues evolving, with 8K content, virtual reality, and extended reality formats creating even larger file sizes and more demanding performance requirements. Ceph’s horizontal scalability allows for elasticity to meet growing data demands, ensuring your infrastructure can grow with technology advancement.

As your storage needs expand, adding storage nodes to your Ceph cluster increases both capacity and performance linearly. This scalability model aligns storage costs with actual growth, avoiding the large upfront investments required by traditional storage arrays.

The open source nature of Ceph also provides protection against vendor lock-in, ensuring you maintain control over your data and infrastructure investments regardless of future business changes or technology shifts.

Taking the Next Step: Video Archive with Fixed-Cost Ceph

Building a petabyte-scale video archive with Ceph represents a significant infrastructure decision that impacts both your technical capabilities and financial planning for years to come. The combination of predictable costs, superior performance, and unlimited scalability makes private cloud storage an attractive alternative to public cloud providers for organizations serious about video content management.

The technical advantages of erasure coding, the financial predictability of fixed monthly costs, and the expertise of OpenMetal’s support team provide a foundation for sustainable video archive growth. Whether you’re managing broadcast content, surveillance footage, educational materials, or user-generated video, a properly designed Ceph cluster delivers the performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness that video workflows demand.

Moving from unpredictable public cloud storage to a fixed-cost, high-performance private cloud storage solution requires careful planning, but the long-term benefits, both technical and financial, make it a strategic investment in your organization’s future capabilities.

Ready to explore how a petabyte-scale Ceph video archive can transform your storage costs and capabilities? Contact our team to discuss your specific requirements and develop a customized implementation plan.