BTW for those who are trying to get into this today, Ceph is one of the best (IMO the best, but my opinion isn't worth much in this arena) up and comers. It sit

BTW for those who are trying to get into this today, Ceph is one of the best (IMO the best, but my opinion isn't worth much in this arena) up and comers. It sits at the intersection of object-based storage (as opposed to "traditional" block storage), distributed systems, and robust forward-looking API support and open source. http://docs.ceph.com/docs/master/architecture/ http://docs.ceph.com/docs/master/architecture/ https://github.com/ceph/ceph https://github.com/ceph/ceph https://ceph.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/weil-rados-pdsw07.pdf https://ceph.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/weil-rados-pdsw0... (RADOS paper AKA a review of how to store lots of data in clusters) https://ceph.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/weil-crush-sc06.pdf https://ceph.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/weil-crush-sc06.... (CRUSH methodology paper, critical to why Ceph is better than previous approaches)