WHITE PAPER

Infinidat OpenStack
SolutionsWHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

Table of Contents
Abstract ..................................................................................................................................3
OpenStack Interest and Industry Challenges ............................................................................... 4
How Infinidat Can Help ..............................................................................................................6
Infinidat Values ...................................................................................................................6
Scalability ..........................................................................................................................6
Reliability ........................................................................................................................... 7
Efficiency ........................................................................................................................... 7
Simplicity ...........................................................................................................................8
InfiniBox® in an OpenStack Environment ......................................................................................8
Block Storage (Cinder) .........................................................................................................9
Object Storage (Swift) .........................................................................................................9
Compute (Nova) .................................................................................................................9
Image Service (Glance) .......................................................................................................10
Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................112

2

WHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

3

Abstract
Infinidat has developed a storage platform that provides unique simplicity, efficiency, reliability, and extensibility that enhances
the business value of large-scale OpenStack environments. The InfiniBox platform is a pre-integrated solution that scales tomultiple petabytes of effective capacity in a single 42U rack. InfiniBox’s innovative combination of DRAM, flash, and capacityoptimized disk, delivers tuning-free, high performance for consolidated mixed workloads, including object/Swift, file/Manila,
and block/Cinder. The InfiniBoxTM SSA enterprise storage system takes performance even further and is designed for workloads
that require consistent, microsecond latency for every I/O. These factors combine to cut direct and indirect costs associatedwith large-scale OpenStack infrastructures, even versus “build-it-yourself” solutions. InfiniBox delivers guaranteed 100%
availability without resorting to expensive replicas or slow erasure codes for data protection. Operations teams appreciate
our delivery model designed to easily drop into workflows at all levels of the stack, including native Cinder integration, Ansible
automation playbooks, and powerful Python SDK and RESTful APIs. This paper discusses why Infinidat storage should form the
backbone of your OpenStack infrastructure.

3

WHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

4

OpenStack Interest and Industry Challenges
OpenStack is a growing trend across the IT industry that offers many advantages, including standardization across vendors,
accelerated application deployment and increased efficiency. Infinidat believes in the power of OpenStack and as asupporting member of the OpenStack Foundation, we frequently receive inquiries about OpenStack support from a variety oforganizations. Those organizations typically fall into one of three categories:
1. Organizations that recognize the agility, flexibility and cost-saving possibilities OpenStack offers, but haven’t actuallydeployed an OpenStack environment in production
2. Organizations that have OpenStack environments in production which incorporate white-box storage hardware—a buildit-yourself type approach leveraging storage software layers like Red Hat Ceph (for larger deployments) or LVM (for smaller
deployments)
3. Organizations that have OpenStack environments in production which incorporate branded storage hardware fromtraditional and startup vendors
The third category of organizations we encounter is dramatically smaller than the others, which speaks volumes about bothprevailing client philosophies and the state of OpenStack capabilities among the storage vendor community.

OpenStack is a growing trend across the IT industry that offers
many advantages, including standardization across vendors,
accelerated application deployment and increased efficiency.
Some OpenStack practitioners, found in organizations from the second category above, adopt near-religious philosophies that
all OpenStack deployments should be based on a highly homogenized set of hardware (a “sea of servers”) which supports all thevarious services required—from database, to general-purpose compute, to storage, to network.
This homogeneous “build-it-yourself” approach has benefits at both the very small and hyperscale ends of the spectrum. Atvery small scale, it doesn’t make sense to separate core services like storage and compute into separate hardware platforms—
the costs of adding dedicated infrastructure for different capabilities are too high to see significant incremental return. At
hyperscale, the sheer procurement complexities of buying different permutations of dedicated infrastructure thousands oftimes over impose significant business costs—negotiating with hardware vendors not once or twice but tens or hundreds oftimes is time-consuming and costly. Moreover, ongoing development and support/maintenance costs associated with build-ityourself deployment models can be amortized over a vast amount of infrastructure. So the return on build-it-yourself solutions
can be positive, but only when the scale is either very small or very large.

Crossing all types of OpenStack deployments is acommon thread of efficiency and resiliency challenges.
The cost/benefit forces are different for the vast set of OpenStack users in the middle, with deployment sizes ranging fromtens to thousands of servers, usually with tens of terabytes to tens of petabytes of storage. For those midsize to large
OpenStack deployments, most organizations can’t afford to spend internal engineering and QA time trying to build, integrate,
and tune various storage software layers to function with their chosen hardware platforms. In addition, to achieve enterprisegrade resiliency through the build-it-yourself approach, many organizations end up either buying more infrastructure than4

WHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

5

they need to support the business, or spending more human capital vetting and qualifying both the hardware and software
platforms, obliterating many of the perceived cost savings. Furthermore, the incremental costs to keep a build-it-yourself
storage solution resilient as it grows over time add up dramatically—software used in such environments tends to follow a rapid,
iterative release process, and new hardware must be qualified regularly. Unfortunately, these challenges are often overlooked
until organizations are already heavily invested in the build-it-yourself approach.
Once organizations realize the challenges of scaling OpenStack deployments from initial proofs-of-concept to full production
scale, they tend to move to the third category identified earlier, and start considering OpenStack storage solutions basedon branded vendor hardware. Consultants or “managed” OpenStack distributions are often considered at this stage, too.
Most storage array vendors offer OpenStack solutions that sound simple—traditional arrays updated with OpenStack Cinder
support, for example. The challenges really start to appear when clients dive deeper and start noticing that among other things:uL egacy array platforms usually require a separate management server to translate to OpenStack APIsu There can be significant restrictions on the features that can be used with legacy storage platform OpenStack driversu Authentication layers can be varied and complex

OpenStack storage must address three key challenges—simplicity, efficiency, and resiliency—all with aneye toward total cost of ownership (TCO).
Suddenly, clients in the third category find themselves in a bind: what initially sounded like the easier, cheaper option ends up
requiring dramatically more effort and significantly more cost. The net result is just another layer of complexity on top of theiralready complicated storage environments. This reality is the exact opposite of the OpenStack philosophy.
Crossing all types of OpenStack deployments is a common thread of efficiency and resiliency challenges. From the build-ityourself perspective, typical expectations for scale-out, software-defined storage solutions include:u Several replicas of data to try to achieve four-to-five nines resiliencyuA forced choice between expensive high-performance or low-cost high-capacity alternatives—never bothu An inefficient high ratio of controllers to storage capacity

Branded vendor storage typically does not require so many replicas to get decent resiliency, but the other factors remain—andof course, there is a massive price hike when putting one of these vendor’s logos on the box.
In today’s world, costs of raw storage capacity and compute still add up dramatically, workload profiles can vary dramaticallyminute-by-minute, and four-to-five nines availability is unacceptable, especially at scale. An ideal solution for today’s largescale OpenStack environments needs to challenge the traditional expectations associated with both ends of the spectrum.
Infinidat believes the lack of storage solutions that address all of these challenges for large-scale OpenStack environments is amajor reason why so many organizations are:uS
 tuck dreaming of the values of OpenStack—Category 1u Struggling with scaling build-it-yourself solutions—Category 2u Just plain frustrated with the clash of old vendor architectures trying to adapt to new platforms—Category 3

Fortunately, the advent of truly OpenStack-optimized storage systems like Infinidat InfiniBox gives mid-to-large scale
OpenStack users a better path.

5

WHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

6

How Infinidat Can Help
OpenStack storage must address three key challenges—simplicity, efficiency and resiliency—all with an eye toward total
cost of ownership (TCO), because technology decisions are usually economic decisions in disguise. With over ten years ofdevelopment and hundreds of petabytes of real customer deployments, the Infinidat storage architecture is proven to excel
at all three factors across a variety of use cases, and the Infinidat business model enables clients to achieve unprecedented
economics at multi-petabyte scale. Infinidat’s comprehensive approach to OpenStack integration makes it easy for OpenStackusers to consume these advantages across their entire OpenStack infrastructures.

INFINIDAT VALUESThe Infinidat storage software architecture2, as implemented in InfiniBox, embodies the next generation of highly optimized
storage for multi-petabyte scale deployments, at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. InfiniBox addresses diverse
workloads including traditional line-of-business applications, virtualization platforms like VMware, high-performance computing(HPC) environments, cloud platforms like OpenStack, and many other data-intensive activities. This section describes thefundamental platform capabilities and values that enable this kind of large-scale, mixed workload consolidation for our clients.

The scale of the Infinidat architecture can bothconsolidate existing workloads, as well as support
new workloads like OpenStack, all on the same platform.

SCALABILITY

The development of InfiniBox started with scale in mind. Today, the most popular InfiniBox configuration includes over apetabyte of storage capacity, and larger clients choose to deploy more than 10 petabytes of InfiniBox storage. InfiniBox
scales to multiple petabytes of effective capacity in a single, standard 42U rack. The scale of the Infinidat architecture canboth consolidate existing workloads—clients have consolidated as many as 30 legacy arrays to a single InfiniBox—as well as
support new workloads like OpenStack, all on the same platform. Clients can also choose to start small and grow, with starter
configurations available in the 250TB range. Flexible consumption models, including elastic pricing and FLX STaaS offerings,
allow clients to deploy a larger system than their current requirements and pay for capacity as they consume it.
Capacity and performance scalability typically go hand-in-hand. InfiniBox is designed from the ground up for unmatchedperformance, leveraging as much as 3TB of DRAM and 368TB of flash cache to achieve aggregate performance of over 25
GB/s and 2M IOPS and microsecond latency—depending on workload, a double-digit performance advantage over competing
platforms. Infinidat storage software maintains a “heat index” for all stored data, and dynamic machine learning processes
ensure that the most active data resides in DRAM or flash, while the permanent copy of all data is stored on cost-effective hard
drives. This data movement process happens proactively and continually, in contrast to ”tiering” approaches, with no need foruser intervention or excess data churn within the system. All storage systems implement some kind of caching or tiering layer,
but doing so effectively at scale is extremely difficult, and Infinidat holds several key patents in this space.
While scalability across performance and capacity dimensions traditionally requires multiple storage solutions, InfiniBox isa single storage software platform that can serve any OpenStack workload with extremely low TCO and a 100% availability
guarantee.

https://www.infinidat.com/en/resource-pdfs/infinidat-storage-architecture.pdf

26WHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

7

RELIABILITY

InfiniBox delivers 100% availability guaranteed. InfiniBox achieves mainframe-class availability without incremental costs fromproprietary hardware or excess hardware redundancy.

InfiniBox is a single storage software platformthat can serve any OpenStack workload withextremely low TCO and seven nines availability.
InfiniBox protects data with a patented dual-parity, declustered RAID-like approach called InfiniRaid®, which automatically
distributes data across all the system’s enclosures and disk drives. InfiniRaid supports a concurrent loss of two drives without
any disruption or performance impact. Since InfiniRaid uses all drives in the system at all times, recovering to a fully redundantstate from a double failure of even the largest capacity drives takes only a few minutes. Even though it is designed for
performance, InfiniRaid requires minimal overhead to achieve this outstanding resiliency.
Some clients choose to replicate Infinidat systems for data center-scale disaster recovery purposes. The InfiniBox replicationengine uses our innovative snapshot technology, minimizing data transfer across replication links and allowing systems toperform most replication activities leveraging fast cache alone. To replicate volumes, the primary InfiniBox ships snapshot
logs to the secondary InfiniBox periodically based on a guaranteed RPO as low as four seconds. The resulting asynchronous
relationship is responsive enough to replace synchronous replication in many client environments.

EFFICIENCY

Overall InfiniBox efficiency comes from several factors:uH ighly efficient InfiniRaid data protection—supporting overall 100% platform availability while improving raw capacity utilization

versus typical data protection implementationsuO
 ptimized use of DRAM, flash and hard drives—effectively combining solid-state performance and capacity-optimized hard

drive economics at multi-petabyte scaleu Data reduction software features without compromises—in-line compression, space-efficient snapshots and thinprovisioning

While all data reduction features are important, the values of InfiniBox space-efficient snapshots and in-line compression
particularly stand out for many workloads. InfiniBox snapshots offer a combination of performance and scale (100,000
snapshots per system) that is particularly attractive for modern DevOps workloads that are designed around many copies ofdata. InfiniBox snapshots can also be easily integrated into environments from backup solutions like Commvault to active data
layers like OpenStack Cinder. Leveraging snapshots instead of writing redundant data dramatically enhances overall systemefficiency. Meanwhile, Infinidat real-time data compression increases system capacity efficiency regardless of workload
layout, without impacting performance. Compression occurs as data is destaged to disk, after data is protected in mirrored
controller memory. As a result, writes get acknowledged quickly, but the compression engine has more time to run before data
is destaged, yielding higher compression ratios. These advanced data reduction features multiply InfiniBox efficiency for many
workloads.
Infinidat has designed an efficient platform that minimizes environmental impact and physical footprint during both the
manufacturing process and operations. A fully configured InfiniBox with multiple petabytes of effective capacity occupies asingle 42U rack and consumes 8 kW of power under peak load, for a green energy footprint of under 4W per usable TB. Other
storage systems offer some combination of efficiency features, however, none provide all as effectively at scale as Infinidat.

7

WHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

8

SIMPLICITY

InfiniBox has been designed to be easy to use and integrate into existing data center workflows, regardless of desiredconsumption model, deployment environment, or level of storage expertise. The Infinidat data path already abstracts away
many of the challenges of traditional storage and even new, build-it-yourself architectures, with no need to keep track ofdifferent storage media or physical data layout through the life of the system. Users also don’t need to worry about protocol
choices, as InfiniBox delivers truly unified storage designed natively for multiple workloads and protocols, including Fibre
Channel, iSCSI, NAS and SMB. Clients can easily deploy OpenStack via iSCSI, VMware via NFS, and bare-metal workloads via
Fibre Channel, all in the same InfiniBox.

Infinidat’s end-to-end simplicity allows today’scompanies to focus more resources on innovationand less on storage infrastructure.
Infinidat exposes that simplicity to the administrator via an intuitive HTML5 GUI that facilitates deploying storage within minutesof installing new InfiniBox systems—no training required. For lower-level automation, all InfiniBox functionality can also becontrolled using a native non-blocking RESTful API, Python SDK, and command-line interface (CLI), and Ansible Playbooks
are available. For server-driven workflows, Infinidat Host PowerTools3 and related integrations are available for VMware,
OpenStack and many operating systems.
Simplicity is also reflected in Infinidat’s business practices. All systems include 24x7 on site hardware and software support,
and software licenses and pricing are all-inclusive and predicated on usable capacity. Infinidat’s end-to-end simplicity allows
today’s companies to focus more resources on innovation and less on storage infrastructure.

InfiniBox in an OpenStack Environment
OpenStack was designed from the beginning to offer a flexible assortment of services that may be deployed depending on theneeds of the particular environment. One of the major strengths of InfiniBox in OpenStack environments is that it can interact
with a variety of these services depending on use case and architectural preferences. Typical OpenStack services that can
integrate with InfiniBox include:
INFINIDAT UNIFIED STORAGEuB
 lock storage (Cinder): persistent blockC1

u Object storage (Swift): persistent

VM1

VM2

VM3

C2

storage for unstructured data via HTTPbased APIs

/var/lib/nova/instances/var/lib/nova/instances/instancesu Compute (Nova): virtual machine/fs01

instance creation and management

GLANCE/var/lib/glance/instances/imagesu I mage service (Glance): discovery,

SW11

registration and delivery services for disk
and virtual machine images

SWIFT PROXY
SW12

SW21
iCSI/Cinder

based storage for virtual machine
instances

NOVA 2

NOVA 1

storage for virtual machine instancesu File storage (Manila): persistent file-

OPEN STACK

SW22

STORAGE NODE 1

STORAGE NODE 2/srv/node/v11/srv/node/v11/srv/node/v12/srv/node/v12

FC/Cinder
NFS

Infinidat Unified Storage catering to all OpenStack storage needs
Several of these integrations aredetailed later in this section.
3

https://www.infinidat.com/en/resource-pdfs/host-powertools.pdf

8WHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

Block Storage (Cinder)
Infinidat provides a native OpenStack Cinder block storage driver for InfiniBox which supports both Fibre Channel and iSCSI
storage connectivity. This driver provides all necessary Cinder functionality, including volume management, snapshot
management, migration and more. InfiniBox Cinder integration directly capitalizes on the capabilities and simplicity of
the Infinidat storage architecture, unlike competitive solutions which require ongoing tier management, careful snapshot
planning, and performance planning due to legacy back-end storage infrastructures. These capabilities are particularly
important as workloads change during the growth of a Cinder deployment.
In addition to the Infinidat Cinder driver, Infinidat offers an OpenStack command-line interface (CLI) utility to simplify
OpenStack configuration. Instead of manually editing OpenStack configuration files, the administrator just needs to run one
simple command:# infini-openstack --commit volume-backend set <InfiniBox-IP><Username> <Password> <Pool-Name>
Once InfiniBox storage is added to the Cinder deployment, Cinder users can use standard Cinder tools to provision andmanage InfiniBox-based block storage, without disrupting overall storage management activities or the activities of other
InfiniBox users using different storage pools on the same system.

Object Storage (Swift)
Many clients consider InfiniBox for their OpenStack Swift (or other object storage environments) because it provides capabilities
often not viewed as economically feasible in an object context—particularly high performance (over 2M IOPS) and high-resiliency(100% availability)—without needing the attention required for build-it-yourself solutions. OpenStack Swift can easily consume
InfiniBox volumes with iSCSI or FC connectivity to Swift Storage Nodes running XFS file systems.
DRAM and flash cache layers built into InfiniBox provide dramatic performance improvements for Swift deployments. Thereis no need to carefully tune or balance a mix of different storage media to achieve optimal performance; the Infinidat storagearchitecture handles that automatically. Capacity economics are also improved for many workloads through native InfiniBoxline-speed data compression.

There is no need to carefully tune or balance a mix ofdifferent storage media to achieve optimal performance;
the Infinidat storage architecture handles that automatically.
Shifting primary resiliency requirements from the Swift layer to the back-end InfiniBox platform improves both availability andefficiency, eliminating the need for:u Internal Swift data replication, which wastes storage capacity and multiplies required hardware to reach a particularresiliency leveluS wift erasure coding, which requires more powerful storage controller CPUs and tends to compromise performance

In addition, InfiniBox provides line-speed data-at-rest encryption for security and corporate governance requirements.
Typical Swift deployments are unable to provide that capability without costly or complicated add-ons.

99

WHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

10

Compute (Nova)
Every virtual machine instance running on an OpenStack Nova compute server has a root volume as well as optional ephemeral(nonpersistent) volumes, often unaccounted for in OpenStack storage planning. In many installations, these ephemeral volumes
are stored using local storage on the physical compute node. With this approach, live migration for a running VM may take timeand impact performance, when it works; but by default, such migration is not supported at all:# nova live-migration <guid> <second-cluster>
ERROR (BadRequest): <first-cluster> is not on shared storage:
Live migration can not be used without shared storage. (HTTP 400)

Some InfiniBox customers with OpenStack environments boot virtual machines with root disks stored on iSCSI or Fibre Channelconnected Cinder volumes. However, it’s also possible to use InfiniBox NFS volumes for this purpose. Using InfiniBox NFS sharedstorage for OpenStack virtual machine root disks provides several key benefits that contribute to infrastructure agility:u Stateless compute hosts. As long as there are no virtual machine instances running on a compute host, users can take thathost offline or wipe it completely without affecting the rest of the OpenStack environment.

u Easier recovery from compute node failures. If a compute node fails, virtual machine instances are usually easily

recoverable as their data resides on the InfiniBox and not on the compute node’s local storage.

uS impler capacity provisioning and expansion. Without changing hardware configuration or any other aspect of thecompute nodes, it is possible to seamlessly provision and increase the capacity of VM repositories stored on the InfiniBox,
either leveraging the simple InfiniBox GUI or APIs including Python SDK. Further, built-in InfiniBox compression often helps
reduce overall VM storage requirements.

uF
 aster performance. Highly scalable InfiniBox NAS capability provides optimal performance leveraging DRAM and flash

caching layers without the complexity of manually combining different storage media.

u Live migration. With InfiniBox NAS, live migration doesn’t involve any data transfer across compute nodes—as long as they’reusing the same shared InfiniBox storage.

Image Service (Glance)
Basic OpenStack Glance image servers use local storage on OpenStack controller nodes. However, similar to OpenStack Nova
VM storage, it is possible to use InfiniBox NFS mounts to store Glance images. The benefits are parallel to those explained
previously for Nova: simplifying Glance capacity management scalability, removing the need to plan separate Glance image
backup and replication, and taking performance concerns out of the picture.

10

WHITE PAPER | Open Stack Solutions

11

Conclusion
Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the economics of IT, and open source platforms like OpenStack are leading thecharge. The advantages of OpenStack cannot be understated, however, many organizations fail to realize the full potential of
their OpenStack infrastructures—or even fail to launch them at all—due to storage constraints. Build-it-yourself infrastructures
and typical branded vendor solutions have significant weaknesses for mid- to large-scale OpenStack deployments, from bothtechnical and business perspectives.
Infinidat’s innovative InfiniBox platform addresses these challenges and more, with a particular focus on the most criticalchallenges for growing OpenStack storage infrastructures—simplicity, efficiency and resiliency—all with game-changing
economics. InfiniBox can be easily integrated into major OpenStack services, including Cinder block storage, Swift object
storage, and Nova compute orchestration.
Infinidat understands that storage is the foundation on which successful cloud deployments are built. Our advantages combine
to make Infinidat an ideal strategic partner to help power next-generation OpenStack infrastructures. Contact your Infinidat
representative to learn more.

info@infinidat.com | +1.855.900.4634
WP-OPENSTACK-221003-US | © Infinidat 2023

11