History
Two decades of open storage.
From a graduate research project to the storage foundation behind clouds, research clusters, and enterprises worldwide: the story of Ceph is the story of open source done right.
From thesis to foundation
Ceph began as research at the Storage Systems Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, funded by a grant from Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Every chapter since has followed the same principle: build the future of storage in the open.
2004
Research begins
Sage Weil joins the Storage Systems Research Center at UC Santa Cruz, and the first lines of Ceph are written as part of a national-laboratory-funded effort to build petabyte-scale storage. The first Ceph paper, on dynamic metadata management, appears at the SC supercomputing conference that November. See the research publications.
2006
Ceph goes public
The Ceph paper appears at OSDI and the CRUSH data placement paper appears at SC, and the code is publicly available as open source under the LGPL.
2007
The thesis, and a new home
Sage Weil completes his PhD thesis on Ceph at UC Santa Cruz. Development continues at DreamHost, the Los Angeles web hosting company he co-founded, which supported the Ceph team for years.
2010
Into the Linux kernel
The Ceph client is merged into the mainline Linux kernel, letting Linux mount Ceph file systems without any additional patches.
2012
Inktank and the first stable series
Sage Weil and the Ceph team launch Inktank to provide commercial services and support for Ceph, and Argonaut ships as the basis of the first long-term stable Ceph release series.
2014
Red Hat, and ten years of Ceph
Red Hat acquires Inktank, ten years after the first line of Ceph code was written, and the community celebrates ten years of Ceph at OSCON in Portland.
2018
Cephalocon and the Ceph Foundation
The first Cephalocon draws more than 1,000 attendees in Beijing. In November, the Ceph Foundation launches at Ceph Day Berlin as a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, with 31 founding member organizations.
2026
A charter for the next era
The Ceph Foundation Charter is established and the Ceph Technical Charter is approved by the Ceph Steering Committee, completing a governance model that keeps technical decision-making with the community while the Foundation focuses on funding, outreach, and ecosystem growth.
Today
The future of storage
Ceph ships a new named stable release every year, each supported for approximately two years, governed by the Ceph Steering Committee and an annually elected Executive Council. The next chapters, from the Crimson OSD to the flash-native era, are being written in public. Read about them on the Vision page.
The community today
What began as one graduate student's research is now built and steered by contributors and member organizations around the world. Join the Ceph community, meet the Foundation members, or see where Ceph is heading next.
Read the primary sources
- The original research papers, 2004 to 2007
- Sage Weil's PhD thesis, December 2007
- The Red Hat acquisition announcement, 2014
- The Ceph Foundation announcement, 2018