Ceph and Non-Native Protocols

Years of development have enabled Ceph to build an extensive feature set, bringing high quality and performance storage to Linux. However, clients that don't run Linux (and that are therefore unable to natively talk to Ceph) have a limited scope as to where Ceph can be deployed. Recently, a number of new enhancements have been developed to allow Ceph to start to talk to some of these non-Linux-based clients, such as the Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) and Network File System (NFS). This chapter will look in detail at the various methods by which Ceph storage can be exported to clients and the strengths and weaknesses of each. In all methods, a Linux server is used as a proxy to translate the I/O requests from these clients into native Ceph I/Os, and as such, a working knowledge of how to use these protocols in Linux is beneficial...