The Implementation of OpenStack Cinder and Integration with NetApp and Ceph

Abstract

With the ever increasing amount of data produced from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments, new ways are sought to help analyze and store this data as well as help researchers perform their own experiments. To help offer solutions to such problems, CERN has employed the use of cloud computing and in particular OpenStack; an open source and scalable platform for building public and private clouds. The OpenStack project contains many components such as Cinder used to create block storage that can be attached to virtual machines and in turn help increase performance. However instead of creating volumes locally with OpenStack, others remote storage clusters exist offering block based storage with features not present in the current OpenStack implementation; two popular solutions are NetApp and Ceph. Two features Ceph offers is the ability to stripe data stored within volumes over the distributed cluster as well as locally cache this data, both with the aim of improving performance. When in use with OpenStack, Ceph performs default data striping where the number and size of stripes is fixed and cannot be changed dependent on the volume to be created. Similarly, Ceph does not perform data caching when integrated with OpenStack. In this project we outline and document the integration of NetApp and Ceph with OpenStack as well as benchmark the performance of the NetApp and Ceph clusters already present at CERN. To allow Ceph data striping, we modify OpenStack to take the number and size of stripes input via the user to create volumes whose data is then striped according to the values they specify. Similarly, we also modify OpenStack to enable Ceph caching and allow users to select the caching policy they require per-volume. In this report, we describe how these features are implemented.