Ceph is in the Linux kernel and has been integrated with the leading open source cloud management platforms. Key to Ceph’s design is the autonomous, self-healing, and intelligent Object Storage Daemon (OSD). Storage clients and OSDs both use the Controlled, Replication, Under, Scalable, Hashing (CRUSH) algorithm to efficiently compute information about data containers on demand, instead of having to depend on a central lookup table.

CRUSH provides a better data management mechanism than older approaches and enables massive scale by cleanly distributing the work to all the clients and OSDs in the cluster. CRUSH uses intelligent data replication to ensure resiliency, which is better suited to hyper-scale storage. Let’s take a deeper look at how CRUSH works to enable modern cloud storage infrastructures.