RADOS Block Device (RBD)

A RADOS Block Device (RBD) is software that facilitates the storage of block-based data in the open source Ceph distributed storage system.

The RBD software breaks up block-based application data into small chunks. The data chunks are subsequently stored as objects within the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS). RBD orchestrates the storage of the objects in virtual block devices throughout the Ceph storage cluster. These block devices are the virtual equivalent of physical disk drives.

The RBD software is part of the Ceph Project, and is developed and maintained by the Ceph open source community. Ceph RBD facilitates the storage of disk images, snapshots and storage volumes. It can be used with the OpenStack Cinder block storage service.