Folks – a barrage of free goodies… This latest one is OpenStack related.
Back in mid december, EMC joined the Openstack Foundation. Chuck did a post on it here that’s worth a read.
I knew that there would be some skepticism that it was just a political stunt based on our close partnership with VMware, so I didn’t mention it until we could demonstrate we were contributing code to OpenStack.
BTW – people are waking up to the fact that VMware can partner with OpenStack (with vCenter Automation Center, with Nicira as point examples) while simultaneously competing (vCloud Suite). Ditto with EMC – clearly OpenStack Swift and Atmos compete to a degree. I continuously scratch my head when people can’t wrap their brains around the IT industries’ nature for coopetition – it’s been that way for a LONG time. You cannot structure the future, you cannot structure innovation – and those are the drivers of the IT industry.
Specifically what is now out, are the set of Cinder volume drivers (really a plugin more than a driver) for VMAX and VNX. There is already a Isilon iSCSI Cinder plugin written by a 3rd party, and we’re looking at it now too. OpenStack is very block-centric right now, though we and others like NetApp are trying to change that. Click on the below to get the code snippet from Github.
For those of you that want it in a development release – it isn’t in Folsom (which was closed prior to this). It’s in the G2 coordinated contribution to the main trunk of Grizzly dev release. [updated 1/11/2013 2:05pm ET – thank Brian Cook] – If you want to see more about the G3 checkin to Grizzly, you can see it here. You’ll also note Nova VMware work, and also Atmos Glance adapters – again, highlighting we’re working away on it… http://status.openstack.org/release/
The big picture we’re working on (and you’ll hear more about this through the year – there’s been a LOT of work for the last while around how we do this more generally) is this space of “standardized, abstracted control and data planes for storage”. To give you a hint of how things move along – this is part of the evolution of “Project Orion” (which folded into a bigger Project Bourne) that I showed way back at the end of 2011 here.
In this picture, the pile of plugins could be harmonized in a funky way (and plugin to VMware’ SDS plans, Hyper-V, OpenStack looking upwards, but also to not only EMC, but others, including commodity storage) looking downward. EXPECT MORE HERE :-)
Thanks Chad for championing this. Integrations of enterprise hardware into OpenStack is something us users have been looking for.
It is great to see EMC join the fun.
--Colin
Posted by: Colinmcnamara | January 14, 2013 at 11:13 PM