Gluster Community Congratulates OpenStack Developers on Havana Release

The Gluster Community would like to congratulate the OpenStack Foundation and developers on the Havana release. With performance-boosting enhancements in OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder), Compute (Nova) and Image Service (Glance), as well as native template language with OpenStack Orchestration (Heat), the OpenStack Havana release points the way to continued momentum for the OpenStack community. The many storage features in the Havana release coupled with the growing scope of typical OpenStack deployments demonstrate the need for scale-out, open software-defined storage solutions. The fusion of GlusterFS open software-defined storage with OpenStack software is a match made in cloud heaven.

Naturally, the Gluster Community would like to focus on OpenStack enhancements that pertain directly to our universe:

OpenStack Glance

• OpenStack Cinder can now be used as a block-storage back-end for the Image Service. For Gluster users, this means that Glance can point to the same image as Cinder, which means it is not necessary to copy the entire image before deploying, saving some valuable time.

OpenStack Nova

• OpenStack integration with GlusterFS utilizing the QEMU/libgfapi integration reduces the kernel space to user space context switching to significantly boost performance.
• When connecting to NFS or GlusterFS backed volumes, Nova now uses the mount options set in the Cinder configuration. Previously, the mount options had to be set on each Compute node that would access the volumes. This allows operators to more easily automate the scaling of their storage platforms.
• QEMU-assisted snapshotting is now used to provide the ability to create cinder volume snapshots, including GlusterFS.

OpenStack Heat

• Initial support for native template language (HOT). For OpenStack operators, this presents an easier way to orchestrate services in application stacks.

OpenStack Swift

• There is nothing in the OpenStack Havana release notes pertaining to GlusterFS and Swift integration but we always like to talk about the fruits of our collaboration with Swift developers. We are dedicated to using the upstream Swift project API/proxy layer in our integration, and the Swift team has been a pleasure to work with, so kudos to them.

To give an idea of the performance improvements in the GlusterFS-QEMU integration that Nova now takes advantage of, consider the early benchmarks below published by Bharata Rao, a developer at IBM’s Linux Technology Center.

FIO READ numbers

FIO WRITE numbers

“Base” refers to an operation directly on a disk filesystem.

Havana vs. Pre-Havana
This is a snapshot to show the difference between the Havana and Grizzly releases with GlusterFS.
 

The Orchestration feature we are excited about is not Gluster-specific, but has several touch points with GlusterFS, especially in light of the newly-introduced Manila FaaS project for OpenStack (https://launchpad.net/manila). Imagine being able to orchestrate all of your storage services with Heat, building the ultimate in scale-out cloud applications with open software-defined storage that scales with your application as needed.

We’re very excited about the Havana release and we look forward to working with the global OpenStack community on this and future releases. Download the latest GlusterFS version, GlusterFS 3.4, from the Gluster Community at gluster.org, and check out the performance with a GlusterFS 3.4-backed OpenStack cloud.

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