How to make storage devices OpenStack Compliant

If your company has storage infrastructure offerings such SDS or block device and would like to further proliferate its usage, plan to support OpenStack. Integrating your storage with OpenStack may be challenging especially if OpenStack is not your focus area. Supporting OpenStack seems to be on every storage vendor’s roadmap, but only a few have made it a priority, as engineering resources are always limited. Ironically, vendors who adopt new technology early are perceived as experts in their domain by the end users and hence it pays off of stay ahead of the curve.

To support OpenStack, you require to develop a cinder volume driver, that will drive your storage using public interfaces or protocol that you may have exposed your storage system. The cinder volume driver would establish a connection with your system using your interface, to provision the storage, to be used by OpenStack instances. Typically, the connection establishment information would come from a cinder configuration file, where you would also have to provide your driver name. Every volume driver at a minimum should support features such as

• 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

Finally, when you are ready with the driver, apart from writing your own test bench, you should also consider using the test framework tempest. This framework is available with OpenStack releases. Tempest framework helps validate your driver functionality. The framework is very powerful and can help you get one step closer to getting your driver listed into OpenStack release.

At Cadence Data Soft we have very strong understanding of OpenStack, both from development and implementation perspective.To schedule a discussion on how we may be able to help you, simply click here