Cloud computing has evolved from compute-centric to include basic persistent storage and controlled performance storage. However, the cloud industry still lags 3-5 years behind Amazon EBS. CloudStack's storage integration needs improvement to better support enterprise applications and high-margin workloads. Specifically, CloudStack needs finer storage granularity, scheduling, secondary storage, high availability, and integration ease. The presenters outline a plan to address these needs through a new CloudStack Storage API, improved driver model, more resources dedicated to storage, and continued refinement of storage requirements.

1. CloudStack & Cloud Storage
Where are we at? Where are we going? Why should you care?
John Griffith, Lead Open Source Developer, jgriffith@solidfire.com
Dave Cahill, Director of Strategic Alliances, dcahill@solidfire.com

2. Evolution of EBS
Ephemeral volumes (EC2)
Launched ‘06
Developer-
oriented
No enterprise
apps
Compute centric
EBS
Launched ‘08
Basic persistent
storage
Dev/test and
limited
production apps
Low IO DBs/apps
Boot from EBS
Launched ‘09
Fully persistent
virtual machines
Basic enterprise
apps
Provisioned IOPS
Launched ‘12
Controlled
Performance
Wider range of
performance
sensitive apps

3. Where is the rest of the cloud industry?
Object Storage
Atmos, Nirvanix,
Scality, Swift
Backup, archival,
content repository
Cheap and deep
Instance
Storage
Local shared disk
Typically persistent
No HA, limited
performance
Network
Storage
EMC, 3Par, Netapp,
Dell
Persistent, HA
Variable performance,
No SLAs, limited scale

4. The rest of the industry is 3-5 years
behind Amazon EBS, working with
inferior technology designed for the
Enterprise

5. Margin
High
Med
Low
IOPS
Applications
Test / Development
Backup / Archive
Cloud Opportunity
The
Opportunity
Ahead
Low Hig
h
Performance Sensitive Apps
Oracle / SAP
Hadoop / NoSQL
Performance
Sensitivity
$$$
$$
$

6. Watch out for
the Noisy
Neighbor
• Few resource hungry
applications
negatively affect all
other volume
performance
Traditional Multi-Tenant
Performance
Noisy Neighbor

7. Accessing the
Cloud
Opportunity
• Affordable all-SSD performance
• Fine-grain QoS control for writing
firm performance SLAs
• Increase VM density to enable
higher profits
• Complete management
automation to maximize efficiency

8. Accessing the
Cloud
Opportunity
with
CloudStack
Not so fast, without…
• Better block storage
– Critical to migrating high-margin apps from on-
premises, managed, and dedicated
environments to the cloud
• Better storage integration
– For a CloudStack-based infrastructure to
adequately address the next phase of cloud
computing requires deeper and more
advanced storage integration

9. CloudStack & Cloud Storage
Where are we today?
• A work in progress
– Not much beyond basic Xen Server functionality
– Very generic treatment of storage
– Treat storage as one giant LUN
• Advanced storage functionality requires work-around
– QoS, Provisioning, Snapshots, Clones
• No storage management interface
– All storage management an admin function outside of CloudStack
– Lack a good plug-in architecture/driver model

10. CloudStack & Cloud Storage
Where do we need to go?
• Finer granularity
– Have to be able to provision more granularly than one big LUN
• Scheduling
– No directing instance types of customers to specific volumes
• Enable secondary attached storage
– No concept of instance and data mobility
• Improve High Availability
– Can’t attach volumes across different hypervisor hosts
• Ease of integration
– Very hard to add storage driver today
• Backup capability
– Ability to backup to object storage

11. CloudStack & Cloud Storage
How are we going to get there?
• Better defined integration
– New CloudStack Storage API
– New Storage driver model
• More resources and contributors behind the effort
– This is more than just adding support for storage
– Need core bug fixes, enhancements and contributions
– Core contributions to storage design and framework
• Continue to refine understanding of storage requirements
– Drive greater storage awareness
– Need CloudStack storage ambassadors
– Gather customer/end-user feedback

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