Ceph was developed at University of California, Santa Cruz, by Sage Weil in 2003 as a part of his PhD project. The initial implementation provided the Ceph Filesystem (CephFS) in approximately 40,000 lines of C++ code. This was open sourced in 2006 under a Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) to serve as a reference implementation and research platform. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory supported Sage's early followup work from 2003 to 2007.
DreamHost, a Los-Angeles-based web hosting and domain registrar company also co-founded by Sage Weil, supported Ceph development from 2007 to 2011. During this period Ceph as we know it took shape: the core components gained stability and reliability, new features were implemented, and the road map for the future was drawn. During this time a number of key developers began contributing, including Yehuda Sadeh-Weinraub, Gregory Farnum, Josh Durgin, Samuel Just, Wido den Hollander, and Loïc Dachary.
In 2012 Sage Weil founded Inktank to enable the widespread adoption of Ceph. Their expertise, processes, tools, and support enabled enterprise-subscription customers to effectively implement and manage Ceph storage systems. In 2014 Red Hat, Inc.,the world's leading provider of open source solutions, agreed to acquire Inktank.
The term Ceph is a common nickname given to pet octopuses; Ceph and is an abbreviation of cephalopod, marine animals belonging to the Cephalopoda class of molluscs. Ceph's mascot is an octopus,referencing the highly parallel behavior of an octopus and was chosen to connect the file system with UCSC's mascot, a banana slug named Sammy. Banana slugs are gastropods,which are also a class of molluscs. As Ceph is not an acronym, it should not be uppercased as CEPH.
