Erasure coding allows Ceph to achieve either greater usable storage capacity or increase resilience to disk failure for the same number of disks versus the standard replica method. Erasure coding achieves this by splitting up the object into a number of parts and then also calculating a type of cyclic redundancy check (CRC), the erasure code, and then storing the results in one or more extra parts. Each part is then stored on a separate OSD. These parts are referred to as K and M chunks, where K refers to the number of data shards and M refers to the number of erasure code shards. As in RAID, these can often be expressed in the form K+M, or 4+2, for example.

In the event of an OSD failure which contains an object's shard which is one of the calculated erasure codes, data is read from the remaining OSDs that store data with no impact. However, in the event of an OSD failure which contains the data shards of an object, Ceph can use the erasure codes to mathematically recreate the data from a combination of the remaining data and erasure code shards.