The Ceph storage ecosystem currently covers the full range of File, Object and Block access with Ceph-specific protocols. Standard NAS protocols such as SMB and NFS were recently added and expanded to allow client-native protocols to consume this scale out file storage.
The team at Red Hat and then IBM have been looking into ways to enhance our storage stack with an SMB3 gateway to our Ceph File System. Based on the feedback we’ve received on the business side as well as the Open Source community IBM plans to add SMB as a fully integrated component of Ceph - upstream and downstream.
In our talk we want to highlight some of the implementation aspects that need to be addressed for adopting this plan. We want to share the progress we have already achieved for easier management of SMB using Samba, discuss the challenges for SMB clustering and High Availability and finally give an outlook on the upcoming planned features. Our goal is to make SMB a natural choice when connecting clients to the Ceph storage system.