Improving Ceph Economics with QAT Hardware Offload
summary
A four‑node Ceph cluster (each node dual Xeon 6548 with two QAT cores, 100 Gb networking, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) uses Intel QAT offload and the minio warp workload to test server‑side compression. Baseline reads hit ~22 Gbps and writes ~4.6 Gbps, enabling compression without QAT halves throughput, enabling QAT restores near‑baseline performance while reducing disk IO. Real datasets show variable savings (24% on COVID text, 68% saving on raw video), and the hardware premium is about $500 per node, making modest compressibility cost‑effective.
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