Integrating Ceph Storage with Windows: Options, Methods, and Access Interfaces

Happy New Year! A brief review of 2017 storage trends shows SDS and HCI as the fastest‑growing technologies, with Ceph emerging as a leading open‑source solution.

Integrating Ceph with Windows is not as straightforward as with Linux; Windows lacks a native Ceph client. Two viable integration options are the Ceph Object Gateway and the iSCSI target provided by SUSE Enterprise Storage.

The Ceph Object Gateway offers RESTful access compatible with Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift, but it does not provide direct OS‑level access. The iSCSI gateway, available in SUSE Enterprise Storage, presents Ceph as an iSCSI SAN, allowing Windows servers to connect via the built‑in iSCSI Initiator, which is the most transparent method for Windows.

Ceph’s architecture consists of many OSD nodes that store data as objects. A typical deployment may involve hundreds or thousands of OSDs. Ceph provides four primary ways for users to access object storage:

Amazon S3‑compatible RADOS gateway for reliable distributed object storage.

iSCSI interface that turns Ceph into an iSCSI SAN.

CephFS, a POSIX‑compatible file system installed on Ceph clients.

RADOS block device (RBD), which appears as a regular Linux block device.

For file sharing, administrators can create NFS shares on top of Ceph’s underlying object storage. While the S3 interface is unsuitable for NFS, both RBD and CephFS can be exported via NFS, allowing Linux and Unix clients to access shared files.

Additional Ceph resources and detailed analyses are linked throughout the article for readers who wish to explore the architecture, ecosystem, backend object development, and competing products.