OpenStack
Flash Storage for Cinder, Swift, and Glance
The Nimble Storage driver for the OpenStack software platform ensures that your IT and DevOps teams can focus on providing value-added cloud services instead of on administrative tasks.
A turnkey solution for cloud service providers (CSPs) and enterprises, the Nimble OpenStack driver for block storage is fully integrated in the Nimble Storage Predictive Flash Platform. It enables a single array to deliver multiple service level agreements (SLAs). It provides backend storage for OpenStack. It supports Nova compute services, Cinder storage services, and Glance image services and repositories.
Advantages of the Nimble OpenStack driver for cloud services include:
- Efficiency beyond commodity storage. Drastically reduce storage footprint and costs by up to 5X or more with space saving and data protection features.
- Deliver enterprise SLAs. Meet and exceed uptime and performance SLAs.
- Secure and isolate tenants with tenant level encryption, multitenancy, and Quality of Service features.
- Simplify storage management. InfoSight Predictive Analytics and driver integrations automate storage management and predicts and prevent problems before they occur.
Nimble OpenStack Driver Features
Volume Operations
- Volume create/delete
- Volume attach/detach
- Snapshot create/delete
- Create volume from snapshot
- Get volume stats
- Copy image to volume
- Copy volume to Image
- Clone volume
- Extend volume
Volume Stats / Attributes
- Driver version
- Free capacity
- Reservation (%)
- Total capacity
- Volume backend
Deliver Fast, Reliable, Storage Services More Efficiently
Choosing the right storage for your OpenStack cloud is more important than you think. Homegrown solutions using commodity hardware and open source software may seem appealing at first, but in reality they are inefficient, difficult to manage, and rarely meet the performance and reliability needs of enterprises.
The Nimble Storage Predictive Flash platform provides an OpenStack Cinder driver for block storage and also enables flash storage for Swift object storage and Glance image services:
Swift object storage benefits from fast and predictable flash performance using Predictive Flash storage while reducing the overhead of the default 3 copy policy.
The Nimble Cinder driver, lets you directly access Predictive Flash storage as a block device. Automate provisioning, snapshots and cloning and let Nimble arrays offload I/O intensive operations from the host.
Glance image services benefit from using Predictive Flash storage as ephemeral storage for virtual machine images. Rapid image deployment and space savings are achieved using off-host space efficient snapshot and cloning.
Efficiency – 3 Copies is Wasteful
Open source storage projects like Ceph and Swift recommend a three copy policy for storage. The cost of storing three copies adds up quickly and not only effects disk/SSD costs, but also data center and operating costs.
Nimble Predictive Flash platform is the most efficient in the market, providing the highest level of usable and effective capacity for all-flash arrays – storing over 2PB of data in just 12U of rack space. Space saving features like inline deduplication and compression reduce your storage usage and footprint by up to 5X or more. Space efficient snapshots, data replication, and clones ensure data is protected without performance overhead.
Improve Service Levels
Fast and reliable – pick both. Nimble Predictive Flash platform delivers over 99.9999% measured uptime and scales to over 1.2 million IOPS in a single cluster enabling you to improve both your uptime and performance SLAs.
Further optimize by providing premium and cost-optimized SLAs and adjust them the fly using the Unified Flash Fabric that combines all-flash and hybrid flash into a single pool of storage with common data services.
Uptime
1.2 Million IOPS
Secure and Isolate Tenants
Build an Openstack cloud that consolidates all your tenants. Everyone happily living together under one roof (cloud).
Encryption
Application or Tenant granular encryption and data shredding.
Multitenancy
Securely separate and abstract multiple tenants at both the storage network and volume levels.
Quality of Service
Automatically prevent rogue workloads from hogging resources.
Nimble Storage Value in OpenStack
Nimble enables multiple storage service levels and provides backend storage for Openstack infrastructure.
Manage Openstack, Not your Storage
Nimble InfoSight Predictive Analytics correlates trillions of sensor data points to predict and prevent issues across the infrastructure stack. Native driver integration automates storage provisioning through Openstack. InfoSight allows you to focus on cloud orchestration and new services, and spend less time managing your storage and infrastructure.
Partner Certifications
Nimble has been a contributor to the OpenStack community since 2013. We also work with distribution partners to ensure our storage is easy to deploy and works with supported and stable releases.
Resources:
Documentation:
Download Solution Brief: OpenStack (PDF).
Download Case Study: Yahoo! JAPAN Strengthens Data Centre Flexibility with Nimble (PDF).