IBM Spectrum Scale in an OpenStack cloud deployment
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter. Using IBM Spectrum Scale™ in an OpenStack cloud environment offers many benefits, including the enterprise features of IBM Spectrum Scale and consolidated storage options.
An introduction to OpenStack
OpenStack is an open source software platform that is widely used as the base to build cloud infrastructure as a service solutions. OpenStack is typically deployed on commodity hardware and is used to virtualize various parts of the infrastructure (compute, storage, and network) to ease the sharing of the infrastructure across applications, use cases and workloads.Using IBM Spectrum Scale in an OpenStack cloud deployment
Deploying OpenStack over IBM Spectrum Scale offers benefits provided by the many enterprise features in IBM Spectrum Scale as well as the ability to consolidate storage for various OpenStack components and applications running on top of the OpenStack infrastructure under a single storage management plane. One key benefit of IBM Spectrum Scale is that it provides uniform access to data under a single namespace with integrated analytics.
OpenStack components
- Cinder: Provides virtualized block storage for virtual machines. The IBM Spectrum Scale Cinder driver, also known as the GPFS™ driver, is written to take full advantage of the IBM Spectrum Scale enterprise features.
- Glance: Provides the capability to manage virtual machine images. When Glance is configured to use the same IBM Spectrum Scale fileset that stores Cinder volumes, bootable images can be created almost instantly by using the copy-on-write file clone capability.
- Swift: Provides object storage to any user or application that requires access to data through a RESTful API. The Swift object storage configuration has been optimized for the IBM Spectrum Scale environment, providing high availability and simplified management. Swift object storage also supports native the Swift APIs and Amazon S3 APIs for accessing data. Finally, the Swift object storage also supports access to the same data through either object interface or file interface (POSIX, NFS, SMB) without creating a copy.
- Manila: Provides a shared file system access to client, virtual, and physical systems. The IBM Spectrum Scale share driver (GPFS driver) is written to take full advantage of the IBM Spectrum Scale enterprise features.
- Keystone: Although not a storage component, internal keystone with in-built HA is provided by IBM Spectrum Scale as part of the Object protocol. In deployments that already have keystone support, the Object protocol can be configured to use the external keystone server rather than the internal one.
| Feature | Support | Feature | Support |
|---|---|---|---|
| Volume and Image Management (Cinder and Glance) | |||
| Volume Creation and Deletion | Yes | Volume Snapshot management | Yes |
| Volume Creation from Snapshot | Yes | Extend volumes | Yes |
| Copy Image to Volume and Copy Volume to Image | Yes | Instantaneous Boot Volume Create From Glance Repo | Yes |
| Live migration of instances | Yes | Backup of volumes | Yes |
| Data sharing between instances (with file system support) | Yes | Quality of service using multi-tier storage (with Flash support) | Yes |
| Encryption of volumes | Yes | Tiering of volumes | Yes |
| Compression of volumes | Yes | Volume Attach and Detach to a VM instance | Yes |
| Identity Management (Keystone) | |||
| Integrated High Availability across the IBM Spectrum Scale protocol nodes | Yes | Easy configuration, management, and monitoring | Yes |
| AD and LDAP Support | Yes | External keystone support | Yes |
| Object store features (Swift) | |||
| Unified file and object support | Yes | In-place analytics with Hadoop compatibility | Yes |
| High performance and High Availability | Yes | Object compression | Yes |
| Object encryption | Yes | Multi-region support | Yes |
| WAN caching with Active File Management (AFM) | Yes | Policy based information life cycle management | Yes |
| Easy install, configuration, and management | Yes | Integrated monitoring | Yes |
| Swift and S3 API Support | Yes | Large object support (5 TB) | Yes |
| Support for OpenStack Swift object store features | Yes | ||
| Manila | |||
| Support for NFS | Yes | Support for SMB (CIFS) | No |