Ceph is a free software istributed file system created by researchers at the Storage Systems Research Center in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The main developer is Sage Weil (developer of the Webring concept and founder of Dreamhost), who implemented much of the Ceph code for his doctoral dissertation based both on earlier SSRC research and his own research. Ceph's main goals are to be POSIX-compatible, and completely distributed without single points of failure. As with most distributed file systems, it supports transparent replication and fault tolerance. As of November 2007, Ceph is considered to be in an "early alpha stage" and is not yet ready for production.