Cinder Driver for Blockbridge EPS

This blueprint covers a Cinder volume driver supporting iSCSI access to Blockbridge multi-tenant secure storage. The volume driver is targeted for OpenStack Liberty.

Driver feature set upon initial submission:
1. Volume Create / Delete
2. Volume Attach / Detach
3. Snapshot Create / Delete
4. Create Volume from Snapshot
5. Get Volume Stats
6. Copy Image to Volume
7. Copy Volume to Image
8. Clone Volume
9. Extend Volume
10. Quality of Service

Driver features under development:
A. Replication
B. Manage / Unmanage Volume

About Blockbridge Elastic Programmable Storage

Blockbridge software transforms commodity and/or existing legacy infrastructure into secure multi-tenant storage that operates as a programmable service. Blockbridge provides automatic encryption, secure deletion, quality of service, secure replication, transport security and data exfiltration detection on your choice of hardware/storage.

Technical Overview

Blockbridge is fully API driven software-defined storage. We provide an HTTP API that is tailored to the specific needs of Cinder, allowing each operation to map to a single backend API request while delivering ACID semantics for Cinder operations.

Blockbridge automatically creates isolated management domains on a per-project basis. Virtual disks and clones with unique encryption keys are generated on demand along with unique virtual iSCSI targets. iSCSI CHAP credentials are randomly generated on demand.

OpenStack users may (but are not required to) utilize Blockbridge interfaces to manage replication, audit logs, statistics and performance information. In addition, they can manage low-level data security functions including verification of data authenticity and encryption key delegation.

Initial Cinder Volume Driver

The Blockbridge cinder volume driver is a simple proxy that uses queries to identify resources: any given instance of a driver specifies a query for resources. For example, the query could be “+ssd +10.0.0.0 +6nines -production iops.reserve=1000 capacity.reserve=30%”. This selects SSD resources, accessible on the 10.0.0.0 network, with high resiliency, for non-production workloads, with guaranteed IOPS of 1000 and a reservation for 30% of the volume capacity specified at create time. The queries and parameters are completely administrator defined. They reflect the layout and resources available within a given deployment.

There are multiple ways to define the resource query string. We plan to support static configuration via a cinder configuration file. Additionally, we will support defining the query using volume-type extra specs and/or qos-specs. Specifying a query via volume-type extra spec or qos-specs will take precedence over a query statically configured within the cinder configuration file.

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Additional information:
http://www.blockbridge.com/openstack

Evaluation and developer access:
http://www.blockbridge.com/trial