In advance of the OpenStack Summit in Paris next week, flash array vendor Pure Storage is throwing its weight behind the open source cloud operating system.

Pure this week joined the OpenStack Foundation as a corporate sponsor and pledged to heavily participate in development of the OpenStack code base.  The vendor has also made available an OpenStack Cinder driver and Python Automation Toolkit to help customers use OpenStack-based private and public clouds.

Cinder is OpenStack’s block storage service. Pure’s Cinder driver integrates with the Purity Operating Environment via a RESTful API. The Cinder driver supports OpenStack Juno and Ice house releases and Purity OE 2.4.3 and later. It calls Purity REST APIs for snapshot and volume services and volume migration.

The Python Toolkit lets developers build workflows for Pure FlashArrays. They can add service such as snapshot and replication scheduling, storage monitoring and reporting to Cinder. Pure customers can download the Cinder Driver and Python Toolkit from the Pure website.

Pure chief evangelist Vaughn Stewart said the most of the vendor’s investment in open source communities have gone to OpenStack. Stewart said service providers are a key market for Pure because flash arrays are used for the highest tier of service that providers offer. And those providers are increasingly adopting OpenStack.

“We look at OpenStack as critical for service provider customers and enterprise customers looking to advance their private clouds,” he said. “We believe OpenStack will be the open source winner in this space.”

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The OpenStack Manila file share service is growing up.

During a Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)-sponsored webcast this week, Ben Swartzlander, a NetApp architect who is the project team lead for Manila, outlined the new features in the OpenStack Liberty release that is due for general availability next week. He also gave a preview of the upcoming Mitaka release, which he estimated would be ready in late April 2016.

“There’s an infinite list of ideas for ways to enhance Manila,” Swartzlander said, “so I don’t think we’re going to run out of new things to work on for a long time.”

The Liberty release of the OpenStack Manila file-based storage service introduces some experimental APIs and features that people can use with the understanding those new capabilities could change in the future.

“It enables us to get features out into the hands of users and get feedback on them before we pour the concrete, so to speak,” Swartzlander said.

With Liberty, Swartzlander said the community focused on documentation to bring Manila up to par with the rest of the OpenStack projects, which include Swift object and Cinder block storage. Manila contributors also open sourced the generic server image, which Swartzlander admitted is “something we should have done earlier.”

Other new features in the Liberty release of OpenStack Manila include:

–Oversubscription, which Swartzlander said is “basically thin provisioning your storage and having Manila manage the degree to which you oversubscribe your backend.” He said users could oversubscribe by a factor of 2x or 10x or whatever they are comfortable with.

–Expanding/shrinking of shares. (A share is an instance of a shared file system.) Swartzlander said the new expand/shrink feature is important “because you don’t always know how much space you’re going to need from the beginning.”

–Micro-versions, which Swartzlander described as “basically a fine-grained version of the API, so that every time you make a change to the API, we increment the version number.” He said, “The servers and clients are implemented in such a way that they can negotiate down to a version that is in common between that server and that client so that in case things have changed in the API, they can find a common version and speak that version and maintain compatibility over a wider range of releases.”

–Consistency groups, an experimental feature that allows users to snapshot multiple shares as a unit. Swartzlander cited a potential use case with storage for a database. “Maybe I want to have the table space on relatively large performing storage, and I want to have my database logs on really fast storage to maximize my database performance, and without costing too much,” he said. “But to back up my database, I need to be able to take a consistent snapshot of those two shares. ‘Consistency groups’ enables you to do that.”

–Mount automation of shares. The feature would enable users to intercept operations such as the creation of shares or granting access to a share and trigger a script to automate the mounting of the shares. He said there are different ways to do automation, but this feature covers many use cases.

“One of the major differences between block storage and shared file systems is exactly how the storage gets attached from where the bytes are to where the client is using the storage,” Swartzlander explained. “With block storage, you have a hypervisor in the middle, and the hypervisor has an API where you can tell it, ‘Go connect to this and get that storage and then provide it through to the guests.’ And the guests just see the new hard disk pop up, and the operating system then sees the new block device, and it can automate doing what needs to be done.

“With the shared file system, the mounting is actually direct from that guest [virtual machine] VM through to the backend,” he said. “The hypervisor isn’t really involved in that process, and so getting the clients to automatically mount the storage is a challenge that we’ve been aware of since the beginning of the project.”

–Share migration, an experimental feature that permits the movement of a share from one storage controller to another. Share migration will be administrator-controlled initially, according to Swartzlander.

“The use case for something like this would be evacuation of a storage controller for maintenance,” he said. “Perhaps you want to do load balancing. You have one storage controller that’s working really hard and another one that’s not working hard enough. You can move some stuff around.”

Swartzlander added that share migration would form the basis of future features such as re-typing a share, changing the type of an existing share, changing the availability of an existing share and changing the security domain.

Areas of focus for the upcoming Mitaka release include “Migration 2.0,” additional first-party open source drivers supported by the community, improved support for rolling upgrades and high availability, and share replication.

Swartzlander said the latter feature would allow Manila to configure a share to be replicated to a different availability zone. In the event of a power failure, fire or flood in the data center, users would be able to switch to the replicated copy of the data to keep an application running, he said.

“The goal is to support a wide variety of implementations,” Swartzlander said. “We have, for example, a proposal to do active-active replication or active-passive replication. Synchronous or asynchronous are both supported depending on what the vendor wants to implement and what the administrator wants to enable.”

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BOSTON — Storage is rarely a focal point at OpenStack Summit keynotes, so it was interesting this week to see a Cinder block storage demo — even if it failed — and Edward Snowden discussing data in the cloud.

The OpenStack Cinder demo hit a technical glitch, but the live video feed from Moscow with the former National Security agency contractor went off without a hitch.

Snowden left the U.S. after his 2013 leak of more than a million documents revealed extensive domestic surveillance operations. He told OpenStack Summit attendees they could help the people who make the decisions on how to build the infrastructure-as-a-service layer — which he said is “increasingly becoming the bones of the Internet.

“You could use [Amazon’s] EC2. You could use Google’s Compute Engine or whatever. These are fine, right. They work. But the problem here is that they’re fundamentally disempowering,” Snowden said. “You give them money, and in exchange you’re supposed to be provided with a service. And that exists. But you’re actually providing them [with] more than money. You’re also providing them with data, and you’re giving up control. You’re giving up influence. You can’t reshape their infrastructure.

“They’re not going to change things and tailor it for your needs,” he continued. “And you end up reaching a certain point where, OK, these are portable to a certain extent. You can containerize things and then shift them around. But you’re sinking costs into an infrastructure that is not yours fundamentally.”

He cautioned that, when running on the stacks of Google or Amazon, “How do you know when it starts spying on you?” Snowden asked. “How do you know when your image has been passed to some adversarial group, whether it’s just taken by an employee and sold to a competitor, whether it’s taking a copy for the FBI, whether legally or illegally. You really don’t have any awareness of this, because it’s happening at a layer that’s hidden from you.”

Snowden said OpenStack could make users “lose that fundamental, inherent silent vulnerability of investing into things” they don’t influence, own, control or shape. He said OpenStack requires “a little bit more of a technical understanding” to build layer by layer and “continues to comply with this very free and open set of values that the open source community, in general, drives all over the place.

“We can start to envision a world where cloud infrastructures are not private in the sense of private corporations, but private in the sense of a person,” Snowden said, where a small business, a large business or a community of technologists could own, control and shape OpenStack and “lay the foundation upon which everybody builds.

“And I think that’s probably one of the most powerful ideas that shapes the history of the internet and, hopefully, will allow us to direct the future of the internet in a more free rather than a more closed way,” Snowden said.

Cinder demo problem

The Cinder block storage service factored into an OpenStack Summit demo gaffe in the context of explaining open “composable” and cloud-native infrastructure. The snafu came during an attempt to show how to run Cinder as a stand-alone service using Docker Compose to spin up containers.

John Griffith, a principal software engineer at NetApp, later explained the problem he confronted on stage: “There’s an interesting race condition that in all of our rehearsals we never hit, where the scheduler container would come up before the database container was actually ready to receive requests,” he said. “And so it would crash the scheduler container.”

Griffith said he had never encountered the problem before, despite running “this exact demo probably at least a hundred times” before the keynote.

“Unfortunately, when you’re doing a keynote live demo in front of a few thousand people, you don’t have the liberty or luxury to just [say], ‘Hey, let me try this again,’ ” Griffith said.

Kendall Nelson, an upstream developer advocate with the OpenStack Foundation, said the demo ran perfectly twice on the morning of the OpenStack Summit keynote and at least a half dozen times the day before.

Nelson said the takeaway would have been that users could deploy Kubernetes and Docker with OpenStack, and use OpenStack services such as Cinder stand-alone, without additional services such as Nova compute.

“Really, one of the most important things to take away from that, too, is the fact that Cinder actually, by itself, can be extremely easy for somebody to deploy and use,” Griffith said. “Somebody could actually download that Compose file and run that Compose file on their own and have an up-and-running Cinder deployment.”

Griffith said developers are increasingly realizing a need for persistent block storage with containers.

“There are, of course, people that say the world should be ephemeral, and there’s no persistence. The reality is that’s not the world we live in,” Griffith said. “Databases are pretty useless if they don’t have any data in them. OpenStack has been working on storage for a long time. The container space hasn’t. So this is actually an opportunity. ‘Hey, here is a storage service. You can plug this in, and now all you have to do is focus on your APIs.'”

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