Ceph distributed file system

[Tom Metro]

Anyone tried out Ceph? (Looks like web host company Dreamhost is 
sponsoring its development.) Debian packages are available, but it isn't 
production ready. Dreamhost says they're going to start experimentally 
using it for backup storage.

  -Tom

http://ceph.newdream.net/wiki/
   Ceph is a distributed file system designed for reliability,
   scalability, and performance. The storage system consists of some
   (potentially large) number of storage servers (bricks), a smaller set
   of metadata server daemons, and a few monitor daemons for managing
   cluster membership and state. The storage daemons rely on btrfs for
   storing data (and take advantage of btrfs' internal transactions to
   keep the local data set in a consistent state). This makes the storage
   cluster simple to deploy, while providing scalability not currently
   available from block-based Linux cluster file systems.

   Additionaly, Ceph brings a few new things to Linux. Directory
   granularity snapshots allow users to create a read-only snapshot of
   any directory (and its nested contents) with 'mkdir
   .snap/my_snapshot'. Deletion is similarly trivial ('rmdir
   .snap/old_snapshot'). Ceph also maintains recursive accounting
   statistics on the number of nested files, directories, and file sizes
   for each directory, making it much easier for an administrator to
   manage usage.

   Ceph is under heavy development, and is not yet suitable for any uses
   other than benchmarking and review.