Ceph is an open source software-defined storage solution that runs on commodity hardware, freeing organizations from expensive, restrictive, proprietary storage systems. It provides a unified, distributed, highly scalable, and reliable object storage solution, crucial for today's and tomorrow's unstructured data needs. The world's demand for storage is exploding, so we need a storage system that is scalable to the exabyte level without compromising reliability and performance. By virtue of being open source, extensible, adaptable, and built from commodity hardware, Ceph is future-proof. You can readily replace your entire cluster's hardware, operating system, and Ceph version without your users noticing.

In the next chapter, we will discuss the core components of Ceph and the services they provide.