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From Ceph wiki

Ceph is a distributed file system designed for reliability, scalability, and performance. The storage system consists of some (potentially large) number of storage servers (bricks), a smaller set of metadata server daemons, and a few monitor daemons for managing cluster membership and state. The storage daemons rely on btrfs for storing data (and take advantage of btrfs' internal transactions to keep the local data set in a consistent state). This makes the storage cluster simple to deploy, while providing scalability not currently available from block-based Linux cluster file systems.

Additionaly, Ceph brings a few new things to Linux. Directory granularity snapshots allow users to create a read-only snapshot of any directory (and its nested contents) with 'mkdir .snap/my_snapshot'. Deletion is similarly trivial ('rmdir .snap/old_snapshot'). Ceph also maintains recursive accounting statistics on the number of nested files, directories, and file sizes for each directory, making it much easier for an administrator to manage usage.

Ceph is under heavy development, and is not yet suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review.