Reference Architecture for Deploying OpenStack Compute and Block Storage

SolidFire, Inc., provider of SSD storage systems for cloud service providers, announced, in conjunction with Canonical Ltd., a production-ready reference architecture for deploying OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder).

SolidFire will be demonstrating the deployment of 1,000 production-ready VMs with predictable performance and fine-grain quality of service (QoS) via Canonical, OpenStack Compute and Block Storage at the OpenStack Summit, taking place October 15 through October 18 in San Diego, CA.

John Griffith from SolidFire and David Medberry from Canonical will co-present the summit’s first workshop How to Deploy a Best-of-Breed OpenStack Compute and Block Storage Cloud on Monday, October 15, at 9:50 a.m. local time. The session will include information on deployment tools, tips and tricks, targeted use cases, benchmark results and key enabling technologies.

"SolidFire has done a great job leading the Block Storage project in line with the OpenStack philosophy of delivering a pluggable architecture with integration points for multiple vendors and technologies," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. "It’s exciting to see more production implementations and configuration options available to OpenStack users."

"Canonical has worked with SolidFire to ensure tight integration of Cinder into Ubuntu OpenStack packages to deliver a production-ready cloud infrastructure. As the reference operating system for OpenStack, Ubuntu was the natural choice to integrate with SolidFire’s solution," commented Nick Barcet, Ubuntu cloud product manager at Canonical. "We believe SolidFire’s work in OpenStack is extremely important to the ecosystem, because it allows cloud providers to enhance their offering with high IOPS storage and unprecedented quality-of-service. They have also been leading the Cinder project in OpenStack to deliver a great abstraction layer that can be reused by other vendors to integrate their own solution."

"Cinder has gotten off to a very successful start thanks to the hard work of more than 50 individual contributors," said John Griffith, senior software engineer at SolidFire. "We delivered a deep feature set in our first release of Cinder, which allowed us to move quickly with Canonical in executing this powerful production-ready reference architecture for large-scale multi-tenant clouds."

Key SolidFire-related features
in the first OpenStack Cinder release include:

• SolidFire driver integration
• Ability to create, snapshot and manage SolidFire volumes using OpenStack clients and APIs
• Ability to set and maintain true QoS levels on a per-volume basis
• Ability to store instances on SolidFire volumes
• Enhanced boot from volume options, including support for SolidFire volumes

This Cinder integration follows SolidFire’s recently announced integration with major technology vendors across the cloud ecosystem.