Ceph is the open source answer to software defined storage, however it's much more than that. In an era where the demands on storage are like at no other time before, innovative, scalable and flexible storage abstraction is needed. IT cannot afford to be bound by limitations of hardware centric storage, when the applications that are served by this storage are virtual, cloud enabled and mobile. Ceph is a single platform that can sit over any storage hardware yet present storage in the form you need it from Object through to block and ready to be cloud enabled. This case study provides a real world example of how Ceph addresses the needs of storage in a software defined world in a way that traditional storage approaches just can't do.