Ceph is a distributed storage system designed keeping performance, reliability, and scalability in mind. Performance, reliability, and scalability are three keys for any enterprise-class network environment, and Ceph provides just that. As the capacity of Ceph cluster grows with the addition of new hard drives or solid-state drives, performance grows with it. This is simply because when user data is sent to a Ceph cluster, it is divided into a number of pieces depending on the disk drives and is written simultaneously by all the disk drives. Of course, this is an overly simplified explanation of the entire process. We will look into Ceph mechanisms later in this chapter. Ceph's built-in self-healing system provides outstanding reliability, and the simplicity of adding disk drives or a physical node in the cluster to increase overall capacity provides unprecedented scalability.

A Ceph cluster provides the following three storage types: