As the size and performance requirements of storage systems have increased, file system designers have looked to new architectures to facilitate system scalability. 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.

Fault tolerance is a key challenge for both system design and operations. Ceph is designed to be both highly available and elastic. In large clusters, disk, host, and even network failures are the norm rather than the exception, hardware is heterogeneous and incrementally deployed or de-provisioned, and availability must be continuous. This talk will describe the Ceph architecture and the impact that has on system operations, including failure management, monitoring, and provisioning.