I have also been considering this for some time. Been comparing MinIO, Garage, and Ceph. MinIO may not be wise given their recent moves, as another commenter noted. Garage seems ok but their git doesn’t show much activity these days so I wonder if it too will be abandoned. Which leaves us with Ceph. May have a higher learning curve but also offers the most flexibility as one can do object as well as block and file. Gonna set up a single node with 9 OSD’s soon and give it a go but always looking for input if anyone would like to provide some.
If I can reassure you about Garage, it's not at all abandoned. We have active work going on to make a GUI for cluster administration, and we have applied for a new round of funding for more low-level work on performance, which should keep us going for the next year or so. Expect some more activity in the near future.
I manage several Garage clusters and will keep maintaining the software to keep these clusters running. But concerning the "low level of activity in the git repo": we originally built Garage for some specific needs, and it fits these needs quite well in its current form. So I'd argue that "low activity" doesn't mean it's not reliable, in fact it's the contrary: low activity means that it works well for us and there isn't a need to change anything.
Of course implementing new features is another deal, I personally have only limited time to spend on implementing features that I don't need myself. But we would always welcome outside contributions of new features from people with specific needs.
I appreciate the response! Thanks for the update. I will continue keeping an eye on the project then and possibly giving it a try. I have read the docs and was considering setting it up across two sites. The implementation seemed address this pain point with distributed storage solutions and latency.
I've used Ceph in a home lab setting for 9 years or so now. Since cephadm is has gotten even easier to manage even though it really was never that hard. A few pointers. No SMR drives, they have such bad performance that they can periodically drop out of the cluster. Second, no consumer SSDs/NVMe devices. You need power loss prevention on your drives. Ceph directly writes to the drive, it ignores cache, without PLP you may literally have slower performance than rust.
You also want fast networking, I just use 10Gbps. My nodes each are 6 rust and 1 NVMe drive each, 5 nodes. I colocate my MONs and MDS daemons with my OSDs, each node has 64GB of RAM and I use around 40GB.
Usage is RDB for a three node OpenStack cluster, and CephFS. I have about 424TiB between rust and NVMe raw.
The point about smr drives cannot be stressed enough.
Smr drives are absolutly shit-tier choice in terms of drives.