Notes from OpenStack Meetup

Rob from Netapp presented about Cinder. These are my notes as I heard them – please correct me if I heard something wrong! This was a really great presentation – thanks for the info and the pizza Rob!

OpenStack release cadence: Every six months (Folsom – Oct), (Grizzly April 13)

Cinder is block storage, it was part of Nova volume (Open stack compute).

Cinder is usable now, but Nova volume is still available, but subsequent releases Cinder will be only way to do block storage.

Cinder provides persitent block storage level devices for use w OpenStack compute instances

Someone goes to Horizon, CLI, Progaammatically, requests 4 images. Those are stored in glance, and copied (curl)to cloud service. But there is no persistence volume. Manages creation, attachment/detachment of block devices to servers.

Supports numerous storage platforms, snapshots & clones (LVM based snapshots). Instant snapshot questions, coordinated snapshots, etc.

Folsom goal – break cinder out from Nova.

Grizzly goals: volume backup/resizing, multiple backends, metering/billing support, bootable volumes, secure attache.

Multiple backends = solid fire, dell, netapp, ceph :), you need to run additional instances. But use cases may require single back in.

bootable volumes – boot from cinder. But glance is the canonical authority for all instances, but it doesn’t know about bootable volumes.

secure attach – what can be done to segregate storage for security’s sake? How do you prevent “escape”? need to authenticate instance + volume.

Netapp’s contribution to Essex – Driver in Essex, service-based LIN provisioning.

Netapp talks to OpenStack, uses “type” (from OpenStack) to map to a storage solution catalog. Provides replication, automated failover, dedupe, automatic provisioning/tiering etc.

They provided Clustered ONTAP and NFS drivers.

New NFS types – paralyzed NFS?  Paul Czarkowski was kind enough to point out that Rob probably meant parallel-ized NFS. Paralyzed NFS sounded … interesting. 🙂 (thx Paul!)

q: does Cinder act as an NFS client? a: yes and no, cinder driver mounts an NFS export at server. Instead of creating an exported lun, its treating a file as a virtual block device. Name of block device is based on cinder itself.

Can you coordinate shared file systems between instances (shared fs as a service. OY). Ambition is to make cinder more than a block storage construct.

Working on stuff to support Drupal volumes. Can you create and immediately clone.

Continuous integration doesn’t assess migration req’s – lots of checkins. (Boy ain’t that the truth! 🙂 )

API vs implementation discussion now – —

Now they are talking about the OpenStack Summit – but I’m going to see the FSU – Va Tech game!! 🙂