Storage drivers take advantage of OpenStack


Avishay Traeger
Editor's note: This blog entry was co-authored by Avishay Traeger and Ronen Kat, storage researchers at IBM Research - Haifa.

Started two years ago by Rackspace and NASA, the OpenStack Foundation was envisioned as an open and common code base for businesses to build public and private cloud infrastructure – while sharing common approaches to management services and APIs.

Ronen Kat
In short, OpenStack is free open source software for cloud infrastructure and management. It’s growing fast with more than 150 member companies, worldwide. IBM joined the foundation in April 2012, seeing the foundation’s platform as an important way to help clients use the cloud, as well as promote a ubiquitous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud platform for public and private clouds.

What about Nova-volume and Cinder, those storage drivers from Research?

The Nova-volume and Cinder drivers connect IBM storage products to OpenStack

IBM researchers in Haifa, Israel developed drivers that connect new IBM storage devices to the cloud – taking advantage of OpenStack automated provisioning, improved management, and more efficient compression.
The storage in OpenStack cloud environments can be provisioned using a self-service model that provides storage on an as-needed basis. Using this model, users only get and pay for what they really need, and the cloud provider does not have a situation where cloud storage space is wasted due to over-provisioning.

The Nova-volume and Cinder drivers let those with IBM storage products from the Storwize and SVC family take advantage of OpenStack's simplified cloud deployments and automated storage provisioning.

Connection is just the first step in using the new OpenStack platform. Our vision goes beyond features like automated storage tiering with IBM Easy Tier, Real-time Compression, and space-efficient storage in our products. The next steps will include advanced features, such as the enablement of differentiated types of capabilities through quality of service (QoS).

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,