I think many people (myself included) had been burned by major disasters on earlier clustered storage solutions (like early Gluster installations). Ceph seems t

I think many people (myself included) had been burned by major disasters on earlier clustered storage solutions (like early Gluster installations). Ceph seems to have been under the radar for a bit of time when it got to a more stable/usable point, and came more in the limelight once people started deploying Kubernetes (and Rook, and more integrated/wholistic clustered storage solutions). So I think a big part of Ceph's success (at least IMO) was its timing, and it's adoption into a more cloud-first ecosystem. That narrowed the use cases down from what the earliest networked storage software were trying to solve.