Scality Delivers Persistent Block Storage for VMs

Scality unveils its first contribution to the OpenStack Foundation with its RING plugin for the Cinder project.

Cinder, the block storage layer within the OpenStack project, offers the capability for VMs to discover and use persistent block volumes.

"The Scality Cinder plugin contribution enables OpenStack adopters to catch up with Amazon EBS persistent volumes for VMs," said Jérôme Lecat, CEO of Scality. "With this contribution to the Grizzly release, OpenStack Compute will have the perfect storage companion for deploying in high demand, cloud computing environments. It will boost the market adoption for OpenStack."

The Cinder integration is built on Scality’s distributed sparse file technology embedded in its Scale Out File System (SOFS). Each Cinder volume is effectively a file inside Scality’s scale-out storage. This ensures easy management, scalability and enables advanced virtualization features such as live migrations of VMs and instant failover in case of compute node hardware failure. RING’s distributed architecture enables concurrency and ensures high performance, both in terms of high IOPS and throughput. All of RING’s features, including advanced data protection and data durability functionalities, are available to Cinder volumes.

"This block storage interface completes Scality’s unified storage strategy. Scality is one of the first players to actually deliver on the promise of true and complete unified storage access, including object, file and now block storage,"  noted by Philippe Nicolas, director of product strategy at Scality. "Enterprise and cloud service providers will gain valuable flexibility, improve the speed of deployment and reduce administrative overhead and cost with the Scality Cinder plug-in."

Cinder integration will be available with OpenStack’s Grizzly release scheduled for Spring 2013.