Yeah, as a customer (still one) I remember their "Hey, we're going to build this Ceph thing, maybe it ends up being cool" blog entry (or newsletter?) kinda just sharing what they were toying with. It was a time of no marketing copy and not crafting every sentence to sell you things.

I think it was the university project of one of the founders, and the others jumped in supporting it. Docker has a similar origins story as far as I know.