Virtual Storage Arrays for Nova

Registered by Nelson Nahum

In order to emulate the current IT environments, and to provide better capabilities than Amazon's EBS, we would like to add to nova the capability to create virtual storage arrays. VIrtual Storage Arrays are block storage devices, that have the same performance, reliability and features than current enterprise SAN arrays like EMC Clariion or HP 3PAR. With this feature Users of the cloud will be able to buy, on demand, virtual storage arrays and connect them to their virtual servers as they do in the physical environment. Within the Virtual Storage Array (VSA), storage administrators will be able to choose things like type of drives (SSDs, SAS, SATA), type of interface (iSCSI, AoE, FCoE), cache size, how many virtual controllers, policies around snapshots and remote replications and RAID level. With this feature, cloud providers implementing OpenStack will be able to offer to their clients, enterprise class storage systems at the low cost of simple disk drives attached to servers. Users of the cloud, will be able to choose particular QoS for the storage they use (i.e use only SAS drives or only SATA).
The proposal is to add VSA as an addition to OpenStack without the need to change the volume APIs.

Blueprint information

Status:
Complete
Approver:
Vish Ishaya
Priority:
Low
Drafter:
Nelson Nahum
Direction:
Needs approval
Assignee:
Zadara Storage
Definition:
Approved
Series goal:
Accepted for diablo
Implementation:
Implemented
Milestone target:
milestone icon 2011.3
Started by
Nelson Nahum
Completed by
Vladimir Popovski

Related branches

Sprints

Whiteboard

First appeared in diablo-rbp

TRACK=volume

This is very interesting. The team working on the blueprint here: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/block-storage is planning on supporting different levels of QoS with their implementation. I'm not sure that the depth of control you are suggesting is necessary. Perhaps a provider could provide three or four different SLAs for volumes instead of giving dynamic control over virtual storage arrays? In any case, it will make an interesting discussion topic at the summit
--Vish

(?)

Work Items

Dependency tree

* Blueprints in grey have been implemented.