Tag Archives: Cinder

The Malaysian Openstack storage conundrum

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The Openstack blippings on my radar have ratcheted up this year. I have been asked to put together the IaaS design several times, either with the flavours of RedHat or Ubuntu, and it’s a good thing to see the Openstack interest level going up in the Malaysian IT scene. Coming into its 8th year, Openstack has become a mature platform but in the storage projects of Openstack, my observations tell me that these storage-related projects are not as well known as we speak.

I was one of the speakers at the Openstack Malaysia 8th Summit over a month ago. I started my talk with question – “Can anyone name the 4 Openstack storage projects?“. The response from the floor was “Swift, Cinder, Ceph and … (nobody knew the 4th one)” It took me by surprise when the floor almost univocally agreed that Ceph is one of the Openstack projects but we know that Ceph isn’t one. Ceph? An Openstack storage project?

Besides Swift, Cinder, there is Glance (depending on how you look at it) and the least known .. Manila.

I have also been following on many Openstack Malaysia discussions and discussion groups for a while. That Ceph response showed the lack of awareness and knowledge of the Openstack storage projects among the Malaysian IT crowd, and it was a difficult issue to tackle. The storage conundrum continues to perplex me because many whom I have spoken to seemed to avoid talking about storage and viewing it like a dark art or some voodoo thingy.

I view storage as the cornerstone of the 3 infrastructure pillars  – compute, network and storage – of Openstack or any software-defined infrastructure stack for that matter. So it is important to get an understanding the Openstack storage projects, especially Cinder.

Cinder is the abstraction layer that gives management and control to block storage beneath it. In a nutshell, it allows Openstack VMs and applications consume block storage in a consistent and secure way, regardless of the storage infrastructure or technology beneath it. This is achieved through the cinder-volume service which is a driver most storage vendors integrate with (as shown in the diagram below).

Diagram in slides is from Mirantis found at https://www.slideshare.net/mirantis/openstack-architecture-43160012

Diagram in slides is from Mirantis found at https://www.slideshare.net/mirantis/openstack-architecture-43160012

Cinder-volume together with cinder-api, and cinder-scheduler, form the Block Storage Services for Openstack. There is another service, cinder-backup which integrates with Openstack Swift but in my last check, this service is not as popular as cinder-volume, which is widely supported by many storage vendors with both Fibre Channel and iSCSi implementations, and in a few vendors, with NFS and SMB as well. Continue reading →

The Prophet has arrived

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Early last week, I had a catch up with my friend. He was excited to share with me the new company he just joined. It was ProphetStor. It was a catchy name and after our conversation, I have decided to spend a bit of my weekend afternoon finding out more about the company and its technology.

From another friend at FalconStor, I knew of this company several months ago. Ex-FalconStor executives have ventured to found ProphetStor as the next generation of storage resource orchestration engine. And it has found a very interesting tack to differentiate from the many would-bes of so-called “software-defined storage” leaders. ProphetStor made their early appearance at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong back in November last year, positioning several key technologies including OpenStack Cinder, SNIA CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface) and SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) to provide federation of storage resources discovery, provisioning and automation. 

The federation of storage resources and services solution is aptly called ProphetStor Federator. The diagram I picked up from the El Reg article presents the Federator working with different OpenStack initiatives quite nicely below:  There are 3 things that attracted me to the uniqueness of ProphetStor.

1. The underlying storage resources, be it files, objects, or blocks, can be presented and exposed as Cinder-style volumes.

2. The ability to define the different performance capabilities and SLAs (IOPS, throughput and latency) from the underlying storage resources and matching them to the right application requirements.

3. The use of SNIA of SMI-S and CDMI Needless to say that the Federator software will abstract the physical and logical structures of any storage brands or storage architectures, giving it a very strong validation of the “software-defined storage (SDS)” concept.

While the SDS definition is still being moulded in the marketplace (and I know that SNIA already has a draft SDS paper out), the ProphetStor SDS concept does indeed look similar to the route taken by EMC ViPR. The use of the control plane (ProphetStor Federator) and the data plane (underlying physical and logical storage resource) is obvious.

I wrote about ViPR many moons ago in my blog and I see ProphetStor as another hat in the SDS ring. I grabbed the screenshot (below) from the ProphetStor website which I thought did beautifully explained what ProphetStor is from 10,000 feet view.

ProphetStor How it works

The Cinder-style volume is a class move. It preserves the sanctity of many enterprise applications which still need block storage volumes but now it comes with a twist. These block storage volumes now will have different capability and performance profiles, tagged with the relevant classifications and SLAs.

And this is where SNIA SMI-S discovery component is critical because SMI-S mines these storage characteristics and presents them to the ProphetStor Federator for storage resource classification. For storage vendors that do not have SMI-S support, ProphetStor can customize the relevant interfaces to the proprietary API to discover the storage characteristics.

On the north-end, SNIA CDMI works with the ProphetStor Federator’s Offer & Provisioning functions to bundle wrap various storage resources for the cloud and other traditional storage network architectures.

I have asked my friend for more technology deep-dive materials (he has yet to reply me) of ProphetStor to ascertain what I have just wrote. (Simon, you have to respond to me!)

This is indeed very exciting times knowing ProphetStor as one of the early leaders in the SDS space. And I like to see ProphetStor go far with this.

Now let us pray … because the prophet has arrived.