Sage Weil designed Ceph as part of his PhD research in Storage Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since graduating, he has continued to refine the system with the goal of providing a stable next generation distributed file system for Linux. Prior to his graduate work, he cofounded New Dream Network, the company behind DreamHost.com, a Los Angeles-based web hosting company. Recently, he released a professional services company based on Ceph called Inktank.