Why Ceph storage is called Ceph? What does it stand for?

[AhmedIbrahim]

Hi Community,

I would like to know why Ceph storage solution is called Ceph. Is it an acronym for something? Sometimes it's written in full capital letters (CEPH), other times only the first letter is captial (Ceph).

Other acronyms within Ceph (e.g. CRUSH, OSD, RADOS, etc.) are all known to me, but "Ceph" itself isn't.

Thank you!

Regards,

Ahmed Ibrahim

[Avylove · Accepted solution]

It's short for cephalopod, Octopuses, like the one in the Ceph logo, are cephalopods, The many tentacles of the octopus are supposed to represent the parallelism of Ceph. Ceph came out of UCSC, whose mascot is Sammy the Slug. Slugs and cephalopod are both part of mollusca phylum.

[bonnevil]

The Ceph developers really don't like seeing it written as "CEPH" either, unless its a header where all the words are in upper case.  (It's probably a similar reaction to the one you'll get from folks from Red Hat when they see that name written as "RedHat"...shuddering in horror, shaking heads in disappointment, releasing the Kraken...oh wait, that's Ceph..., and so on.)  :)

The community has a bunch of pretty "release logos" that show different cephalopods for their versions (by upstream release name): https://ceph.com/logos/.

[ashutosh2022]

The name "Ceph" is an abbreviation of "cephalopod", a class of molluscs that includes the octopus.