What is a Ceph (and why do I care). OpenStack storage

Ian Colle is the Global Director of Software Engineering at Red Hat (formerly Inktank), leading the company's Ceph development efforts.

Join us for a walkthrough of the Ceph architecture, its current status, how it integrates with OpenStack, and plans for future development.

Ceph is a fully open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability from terabytes to exabytes.

Ceph offers a Swift and S3-compatible REST API for seamless data access to RADOS. Ceph's network block device can be used to store large images and volumes in RADOS, supporting thin provisioning and snapshots. Ceph has native support for Qemu/KVM, libvirt, CloudStack and OpenStack which makes it an attractive storage option for cloud deployments.

Ceph is short for Cephalopod (ie, octopi). I've head that the name choice had something to do with Banana Slugs....

ref:

http://www.herper.com/inverts/molluscs.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceph_(software)#Etymology