Ceph is a distributed file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. Ceph maximizes the separation between data and metadata management by replacing allocation tables with a pseudo-random data distribution function (CRUSH) designed for heterogeneous and dynamic clusters of unreliable object storage devices (OSDs). We leverage device intelligence by distributing data replication, failure detection and recovery to semi-autonomous OSDs running a specialized local object file system. A dynamic distributed metadata cluster provides extremely efficient metadata management and seamlessly adapts to a wide range of general purpose and scientific computing file system workloads. Performance measurements under a variety of workloads show that Ceph has excellent I/O performance and scalable metadata management, supporting more than 250,000 metadata operations per second.

The Ceph project is always looking for more participants. If you are interested in using Ceph, or contributing to its development, please join our mailing list and drop us a line.

After a few too many months of summer distractions, I've finally moved the Ceph CVS code base over from UCSC to Subversion on SourceForge, and created a Ceph home page. This is largely in preparation for upcoming paper publications which will hopefully increase Ceph's exposure and attract some interest to the project. Yay!