8 Things You Should Know About Storage Deployments With OpenStack

8 Things You Should Know About Storage Deployments With OpenStack

1. OpenStack has sub-projects that deliver both block (Cinder) and object (Swift) storage. A variety of performance-focused primary storage and optimized secondary storage solutions are on the market, and they provide flexible, highly scalable storage services for OpenStack.
2. Optimized secondary storage has clear value for object-based, large-scale storage, where spinning disk still maintains a $/GB advantage over flash and performance is not a significant concern.
3. Cinder is a plug-in architecture. You can use your own vendor’s backend(s) or use the default LVM. Cinder aims to virtualize various block storage devices and abstract them into an easy, self-serve offering to allow end users to allocate and deploy storage resources on their own quickly and efficiently.
4. Swift’s ability to provide scale-out storage on commodity hardware may make it a more attractive option to external storage, such as a SAN, for use cases where $/GB for flash can’t beat that for spinning disk AND performance isn’t a huge concern.
5. The role of the Cinder Project is evolving very quickly and in many ways is quickly maturing through community contributions.
6. Any discussion about distributed storage solutions for cloud should include commercial options alongside open source ones. In the case of cloud storage for performance-sensitive applications, the options provided by open source as well as legacy storage vendors are significantly lacking.
7. APIs are an often overlooked component of block storage in cloud environments. A robust API that lends itself to automating all aspects of the storage system is imperative to achieve the promised operational benefits of cloud. But having APIs alone isn’t enough. Are they robust and complete? Can your chosen storage solution withstand all the API calls you’re going to make?
8. Do-it-yourself storage solutions can save a lot of money, but don’t forget the hidden costs of time. If no services are available to help you install and configure the system, deployment can be slow and complicated. If something goes wrong, who provides support?

This is just the beginning. Read the article for a fuller picture of what’s on your decision horizon. If we missed something, let us know in the comments — and ask questions. Our (world’s best) OpenStack storage deployment experts are standing by to answer them.

Download OpenStack Deployments Done Right: Block Storage vs. Object Storage to help you choose the right storage for your OpenStack cloud.