Ceph is open-source, software-defined storage offering unified object, block, and file storage. Learn about features, licensing, and Red Hat support.
Ceph is a free and open-source, software-defined storage platform that unifies object, block, and file storage on a single distributed cluster. It originated as Sage Weil's doctoral research at UC Santa Cruz and was first open-sourced in 2006 under the LGPL 2.1 license.
Red Hat acquired Inktank, the company Weil co-founded to support Ceph, in 2014, and has since driven much of the project's core development while Ceph remains community-governed under the Ceph Foundation and the Linux Foundation. Red Hat also sells an enterprise-supported distribution, Red Hat Ceph Storage.
Ceph distributes and replicates (or erasure-codes) data across cluster nodes using the CRUSH placement algorithm, avoiding both a single point of failure and a central metadata bottleneck, which lets it scale to exabyte-level capacity on commodity hardware. Since the Luminous release, Ceph has managed raw storage devices directly through its own BlueStore backend rather than relying on a conventional filesystem. It exposes three interfaces from one cluster: the RADOS Gateway for S3/Swift-compatible object storage, RADOS Block Device (RBD) for block storage commonly backing virtual machines and containers, and CephFS, a POSIX-compliant distributed filesystem. The system is designed to be self-healing and self-managing, automatically detecting failures and rebalancing data with minimal manual intervention.
Ceph the software is free and open source with no license fee under the LGPL 2.1 license. Organizations that want commercial support, certified releases, and enterprise tooling can purchase Red Hat Ceph Storage, whose subscription pricing is not publicly listed and is quoted directly by Red Hat. Otherwise, the primary cost of running Ceph is infrastructure and the in-house expertise needed to deploy and operate a distributed storage cluster.
Yes, Ceph is free and open source under the LGPL 2.1 license. Red Hat sells an optional commercial-support distribution, Red Hat Ceph Storage, for organizations that want enterprise support.
Ceph was created by Sage Weil as part of his doctoral research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was first open-sourced in 2006.
Ceph provides object storage (S3/Swift-compatible via RADOS Gateway), block storage (RBD), and a POSIX-compliant distributed filesystem (CephFS) from a single cluster.
Ceph replicates or erasure-codes data across cluster nodes using the CRUSH placement algorithm, which calculates data location without relying on a central metadata lookup.
Red Hat acquired Inktank, the company that provided commercial support for Ceph, in 2014, and has since led much of Ceph's core development while also selling an enterprise-supported distribution.