Itzikr's Blog

If you attended the OpenStack Summit in Boston a couple of weeks ago you must have seen the enthusiasm all around. More and more organizations are adopting the open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service software as a cloud solution for their data centers and using it to utilize their resources and manage their IT projects.

Customers are going in the OpenStack way, using its flexibility and modularity to build computer environments that can scale easily and deploy environments quickly, but they still need a storage solution that support those needs and allows quick access to the data.

Dell EMC’s XtremIO All Flash Array complements that need perfectly. Its unique scale-out architecture goes hand in hand with OpenStack scaling strength, its Data Reduction abilities cut the physical storage needed for the logical data saved, and its integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) together with OpenStack’s services provide a way to quickly deploy environments, all while granting high bandwidth and very low latency for data access, being a 100% flash-based technology.

Attached to this post is a comprehensive white paper discussing the integration between a Mirantis OpenStack environment and an XtremIO storage array, detailing the benefits of such integration, together with guidelines and recommendations on how to do so.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This white paper reviews the integration of Mirantis™ OpenStack® cloud environments with Dell EMC™ XtremIO® all-flash array as its storage backend. It describes the process of deploying such an environment and how to work with it. The paper also discusses the benefits of using XtremIO for such an environment, and how its unique features can be leveraged to create a cloud environment which is easy to operate, quick on resource deployment, provides excellent I/O performance and saves on organizational resources which include physical footprint and storage capacity requirements, as well as operations budget.

BUSINESS CASE OpenStack has been widely adopted around the world by many users and organizations as a private and public cloud solution to control and utilize large pools of compute, storage and network resources in their datacenters. The open-source Infrastructure-as-aService (Iaas) software is being used by a growing number of companies to allow quick deployments of virtual machines, networks, storage and other services to counter the industry’s requirements for an easy, non-expensive, fast solution for dynamic and scalable computer environments.

While the amount of data being saved everywhere grows larger, Information Technology (IT) departments are also being asked to cut costs and deliver quickly – both in time to deploy new services and in those services response time. Adopting OpenStack as a cloud solution gives IT departments a software-based management layer with which to oversee and orchestrate their datacenter resources. OpenStack provides fast deployment of services, but the need of storing the massive amount of data produced in the cloud, from where it can be saved efficiently and accessed quickly remains.

Dell EMC’s XtremIO All Flash Array complements that need perfectly. Its unique scale-out architecture enables maintaining a dynamic amount of data at each scale, and its Inline Data Reduction abilities (such as thin provisioning, deduplication and compression) cut the physical storage needed for the logical data saved by a few multiples at least, allowing customer savings in both space and cost. Being a 100% flash-based technology, XtremIO was built specifically to utilize its flash disks at an optimal level, which allows it to deliver ultrahigh performance for its storage clients at a very low latency, for both FC and iSCSI connections. XtremIO’s Copy Data Services also present a great benefit for cloud environments, as entire projects and tenants in the cloud can be copied to new test, development and analytics environments for almost no extra space in the storage system and with no performance degradation to either environment. XtremIO comes with an easy-to-use user interface to provide storage administrators a quick and convenient way of setting up enterprise class storage environments, provisioning storage to client hosts and applications and monitoring performance.

This paper discusses:

 The XtremIO features and added value for OpenStack environments.

 OpenStack’s cloud architecture and storage implementations.

 Guidance, considerations and best practices for deploying, configuring and operating OpenStack with XtremIO

(This was written on the older X1 generation of XtremIO. X2-related documents will be published in the future.)

You can watch a recorded demo on how it all works here

and you can download the reference architecture from here