Data storage requirements have grown explosively over the last few years. Research shows that data in large organizations is growing at a rate of 40 to 60 percent annually, and many companies are doubling their data footprint each year. IDC analysts have estimated that worldwide, there were 54.4 exabytes of total digital data in the year 2000. By 2007, this reached 295 exabytes, and by 2020, it's expected to reach 44 zettabytes worldwide. Such data growth cannot be managed by traditional storage systems; we need a system such as Ceph, which is distributed, scalable and most importantly, economically viable. Ceph has been specially designed to handle today's as well as the future's data storage needs.