Ceph is a distributed network file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. Ceph fills two significant gaps in the array of currently available file systems:

1. Robust, open-source distributed storage — Ceph is released under the terms of the LGPL, which means it is free software (as in speech and beer). Ceph will provide a variety of key features that are generally lacking from existing open-source file systems, including seamless scalability (the ability to simply add disks to expand volumes), intelligent load balancing, and efficient, easy to use snapshot functionality.
2. Scalability — Ceph is built from the ground up to seamlessly and gracefully scale from gigabytes to petabytes and beyond. Scalability is considered in terms of workload as well as total storage. Ceph is designed to handle workloads in which tens thousands of clients or more simultaneously access the same file, or write to the same directory–usage scenarios that bring typical enterprise storage systems to their knees.