IBM Storage 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 Storage Scale in an OpenStack cloud environment offers many benefits, including the enterprise features of IBM Storage 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 solution. 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. IBM Storage Scale also supports the OpenStack Cinder component with Remote IBM Storage Scale Access Deployment mode on Red Hat® OpenStack Platform 16.1.3 onwards. For more information, see Integrating IBM Storage Scale Cinder driver with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.1.Using IBM Storage Scale in an OpenStack cloud deployment
Deploying OpenStack over IBM Storage Scale offers benefits that are provided by many enterprise features in IBM Storage 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 Storage Scale is that it provides uniform access to data under a single namespace with integrated analytics.
OpenStack components supported by IBM Storage Scale
- Cinder: Provides virtualized block storage for virtual machines. The IBM Storage Scale Cinder driver, also known as the GPFS driver, is written to take full advantage of the IBM Storage Scale enterprise features.
- Glance: Provides the capability to manage virtual machine images. When Glance is configured to use the same IBM Storage Scale fileset that stores Cinder volumes, bootable images can be created almost instantly by using the copy-on-write file clone capability.
- Swift: Provides Swift object storage to any user or application that requires access to data through a RESTful API. The Swift object storage configuration is optimized for the IBM Storage 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 Swift object interface or file interface (POSIX, NFS, SMB) without creating a copy.
- Keystone: Although not a storage component, internal keystone with in-built HA is provided by IBM Storage Scale as part of the Swift object protocol. In deployments that already have keystone support, the Swift object protocol can be configured to use the external keystone server rather than the internal one.
IBM Storage Scale supports OpenStack Cinder component from Ussuri release in OpenStack Community.
The following table lists the available features that IBM Storage Scale supports for deploying the OpenStack cloud storage:| Feature | Support |
|---|---|
| Volume and Image Management (Cinder and Glance) | |
| Volume Creation and Deletion | Yes |
| Volume Creation from Snapshot | Yes |
| Image Creation from Volume | Yes |
| Volume Creation from another Volume | Yes |
| Live migration of instances | Yes |
| Encryption of volumes | Yes |
| Consistency Group Snapshot Creation and Deletion | Yes |
| Volume Snapshot Creation and Deletion | Yes |
| Extend (non-attached) volumes | Yes |
| Consistency Group Creation and Deletion | Yes |
| Volume Creation from Image | Yes |
| Instantaneous Boot Volume Create From Glance Repo | Yes |
| Backup of volumes | Yes |
| Quality of service using multi-tier storage (with Flash support) | Yes |
| Tiering of volumes | Yes |
| Volume Attach and Detach to a VM instance | Yes |
| Instantaneous Boot Volume Create From Glance Repo | Yes |
| Identity Management (Keystone) | |
| Integrated High Availability across the IBM Storage Scale protocol nodes | Yes |
| AD and LDAP Support | Yes |
| Easy configuration, management, and monitoring | Yes |
| External keystone support | Yes |
| Object store features (Swift) | |
| Unified file and object support | Yes |
| High performance and High Availability | Yes |
| Object encryption | Yes |
| WAN caching with Active File Management (AFM) | Yes |
| Easy install, configuration, and management | Yes |
| Swift and S3 API Support | Yes |
| Support for OpenStack Swift object store features | Yes |
| In-place analytics with Hadoop compatibility | Yes |
| Object compression | Yes |
| Multi-region support | Yes |
| Policy based information life cycle management | Yes |
| Integrated monitoring | Yes |
| Large object support (5 TB) | Yes |