Ceph was conceived by Sage A. Weil, who developed it while writing his dissertation and published it in 2006. He then led the project with his company Intank Storage. In 2014, the company was acquired by RedHat, with Weil staying on as the chief architect, in charge of the software’s development.
Ceph only works on Linux systems, for example CentOS, Debian, Fedora, RedHat/RHEL, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu. Accessing the software through Windows systems cannot be done directly, but is possible through the use of iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface). As such, Ceph is particularly suitable for use in data centers that make their storage space available over servers, and for cloud solutions of any kind that use software to provide storage.
We have complied a list of the most important features of Ceph:
- Open-source
- High scalability
- Data security through redundant storage
- Absolute reliability through distributed data storage
- Software-based increase in availability through an integrated algorithm for locating data
- Continuous memory allocation
- Minimal hardware requirements (set-up possible with 1 GB RAM on a computer with a single-core processor and only a few GB of available storage space, depending on the task in the network)