Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the cloud bandwagon without the need to retrofit existing data centers. As with all cloud
platforms, it is designed to automate large pools of computing resources and work with a
variety of virtualization technologies as well with bare metal machines (those with no OS)
and high-performance computing (HPC) configurations, or, simply, supercomputers.
OpenStack Compute is often deployed using one of the many supported hypervisors in
a virtualized environment. Popular choices for hypervisor application would be XenServer
and KVM, which are also widely recommended for most use cases for cloud implementa-
tions. Hyper-V is supported for x86 to 64-bit versions of Windows servers as well as LXC
for Linux.
Object Storage (Swift)
Swift is OpenStack's object storage facility, a redundant storage system. Data is written
in multiple disk drives that are spread across the data center to ensure that they do not
become unavailable at the same time, while the software ensures that that replication hap-
pens and data integrity is maintained across the storage cluster. If more storage is required,
new servers have to simply be added since storage clusters scale horizontally.
In the event of a hard drive failure, OpenStack simply re-creates the contents of that
failed drive into new locations within the cluster using backed-up or replicated data avail-
able from other active nodes. OpenStack uses software logic to ensure distributed replica-
tion across the cluster and different devices, and as such inexpensive standard hard drives
and servers can be used.
Block Storage (Cinder)
Cinder is the module that allows OpenStack to provide persistent block-level storage
devices to be used with OpenStack's compute instances. Cinder manages the creation of
block devices and the processes of attaching and detaching them to and from the servers.
These block volumes become integrated to Nova and appear on the dashboard, allowing
users to provision and manage their own storage needs.
Block storage is essential for performance-dependent applications such as expandable
file systems and database applications or to simply provide servers with access to raw block-
level storage. Backup management is done through snapshots that can be used to restore or
create new block storage volumes, a powerful functionality for backing up data on block
storage volumes.
This is compatible with many storage platforms, including IBM storage, Linux LIO,
Nexenta, Cloudbyte, Ceph, SolidFire, HP StoreVirtual and StoreServ 3Par families, local
Linux server storage, and many more.
Networking (Neuron)
Neuron is OpenStack's network orchestration module, a system for managing networks
and IP addresses. This is a relatively new addition to OpenStack and the first functioning
software-defined networking (SDN) northbound API that allows an SDN controller to
interface with higher-level management and orchestration systems. Neuron enables a high
degree of cloud automation, multitenancy, massive scale, and, hence, added flexibility.
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