A bit more to the story is that it was created also at UC Santa Cruz, by Sage Weil, a Dreamhost founder, while he was doing graduate work there. UCSC has had a lot of good storage research.
I ended up on the ceph IRC channel and eventually had Sage helping me fix the issues directly, helping me find bugs and writing patches to fix them in realtime.
Super amazingly nice guy that he was willing to help, never once chastised me for being so stupid (even though I was), also wicked smart.
I've talked to him at a few OpenStack and Ceph conferences, and he's always very patient answering questions.