Ceph is a distributed network file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability (from terabytes to exabytes). Data is stored in the form of "objects" (variable length, named chunks of data) in a distributed and fault tolerant cluster of OSDs (object storage devices--servers running the Ceph OSD daemon). Metadata (the file system namespace) is managed by an independent cluster of metadata servers (MDSs), which dynamically repartitions the directory hierarchy in response to the current workload.
