This document discusses using Samsung NVMe SSDs and Red Hat Ceph storage to create a high performance storage tier for OpenStack environments. It presents a reference architecture using a 3-node Ceph cluster with Samsung NVMe SSDs that achieved over 28GB/s for sequential reads. This architecture provides scalable, open source storage optimized for performance-intensive workloads like databases, analytics, and networking. Future work is discussed to develop a similar architecture using GlusterFS storage.