The company describes Ceph as a “fully open source, distributed object store, network block device, and POSIX-compatible distributed file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability.” It’s uniqueness comes in part because Ceph does all these things within a unified platform.
Ceph, which was created in 2004 by Inktank Co-Founder and CEO Sage Weil while a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is already making a name for itself in the cloud computing world. Hosting provider DreamHost was an early user of the software, and has led the charge to integrate Ceph with the OpenStack project. OpenStack has its own native distributed file system, but relies on third-party options such as Ceph for block storage.