Openstack Summit Atlanta session
I was very fortunate to have the chance to present with Ken Hui and John Griffith in a session tilted Laying Cinder Blocks (Volumes) Use Cases and Reference Architectures this week at the Openstack summit. The session was standing room only and it was a great honor to share the stage with 2 guys I greatly admire and respect. The presentation can be found here:
There were 3 parts to the session. The first 2 were presented by Ken and John and it was about the pros and cons of using commodity or enterprise storage with examples of why you would choose one over the other or use a combination. The big take away for me was John’s assertion that 70% of workloads in an openstack environment would be well suited for commodity storage. Architecting a mixed environment would be standard for most deployments and Cinder is designed specifically to support this type of architecture.
The 3rd section was about the role of the storage admin in openstack. Here is the talk track that I used.
In the olden days the storage admin was the master of his domain. Requirements for storage would come from an application architect and would drive the storage architecture. Things like IOPS, Capacity, and latency were know quantities and would be considered as gospel during the design phase. If you have ever done a storage design for Oracle you will know that most reference architectures have explicit instructions on how to layout the data, where to put the ASM disk, swap files, Raid groups types to use for data and logs, getting down to the nitty gritty of even giving spindle count for those Raid groups.
Today the Cloud architect is driving the storage architecture. He doesn’t have the details of IOPS or capacity, he just wants tiers of storage and a REST interface to program against. He wants a pool of storage that can be consumed in many different ways by his end users that can scale or shrink based on the consumption habits. This is the basis of how Cinder works. Take a pool of storage that cinder offers as a volume to openstack tenants. They will create and destroy LUNS on demand and need to dynamically map the relationship of those LUNS to the opnestack instances that are using them.
So how does the storage admin give the cloud architect what he wants while still being able to deliver the type of data services (backup,DR, dedupe) that he is required to? How does he remain master of his domain while avoiding “Shrinkage” that can sometimes happen in the pool? I believe that this is where SDS fits the model.
I then showed the demo below asking the crowd to look beyond the EMC equipment used and see the idea of SDS for Cinder. A central controller that can provide a single interface to offer Cinder block storage on Enterprise and commodity hardware and provide all your Object services for Swift, HDFS and s3.
It was a great session and I had many people approach me after and during the rest of the day asking about EMC and Openstack, and more specifically about VIPR and SDS. Thanks agin to John and Ken for inviting me to this talk.
Long live openstack :)
Video from the session
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