I remember having a Microsoft developer (I'm afraid I forget her name — Six?) come and visit us several years ago to demonstrate the then-new SFU 3.0.

Seeing her send SIGSTOP to a running MSWORD.EXE process and observe it stop updating its window in response to expose events was splendid. :-)

See also: ceph.newdream.net

Ceph is a very interesting project. RADOS, their distributed block store is now mainline I believe and the project is coming along in leaps and bounds.

I'm unsure if anybody has a large scale RADOS based blob store though. It would be interesting to see how it holds up.

Dreamhost was doing a ceph beta with testers over a year ago. I see there's a number of blog posts about ceph on their site.