Ceph: The Distributed File System Creature from the Object Lagoon

“The last two years have seen a large number of file systems
added to the kernel with many of them maturing to the point where
they are useful, reliable, and in production in some cases. In the
run up to the 2.6.34 kernel, Linus recently added the Ceph client.
What is unique about Ceph is that it is a distributed parallel file
system promising scalability and performance, something that NFS
lacks.

“High-level view of Ceph

“One might ask about the origin of Ceph since it is somewhat
unusual. Ceph is really short for Cephalopod which is the class of
moulluscs to which the octopus belongs. So it’s really short for
octopus, sort of. If you want more detail, talk a look at the
Wikipedia article about Ceph. Now that name has been partially
explained, let’s look at the file system.

“Ceph was started by Sage Weil for his PhD dissertation at the
University of California, Santa Cruz in the Storage Systems
Research Center in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering.”

Complete
Story