Software defined storage (SDS) brings cloud benefits to storage, but the challenge is that it must be highly reliable – you can’t lose a single byte of data. Storage can be difficult to manage in the cloud where there are many frameworks and technologies working together in virtualized / containerized environments.
At LinuxCon Europe, Cameron Bahar, SVP and Global CTO of Huawei Storage, launched the project proposal for a new open source initiative called OpenSDS:
“What we’re proposing effectively is this virtualization layer that effectively does discovery, provisioning, management, and orchestration of advanced storage services. It allows the open source vendors to plug in their OpenSDS adapters to manage storage. Ceph, Gluster, and ZFS and what have you can plug in through that stack. It allows the vendors from EMC, Huawei, Intel, HP to plug in their adapters. … We define the interfaces once, you make them general enough, and then we’re able to update, both in an open source way and in a proprietary way, these vendor APIs.”
In this keynote, Bahar invites vendors, customers and other open source collaborators to work with them to make this mission a reality: “We want to develop an open source SDS controller platform that allows us to manage both virtualized and containerized and bare metal environments, and facilitate collaborations. Adherence to standards, leverage existing open source, and have a customer and vendor community that comes together to solve the problem together.”
Steven Tan, Chief Architect at Huawei, talked about some of the technical details for how OpenSDS could benefit people using Kubernetes and OpenStack. He outlined three key benefits: “The first one is to be able to plug in to be able to provide a seamless plugin for any framework. Second, to be able to provide an end-to-end storage management with a single solution. Third, to support a broad set of storage including closed storage.”
Tan went on to talk more about how the project will be managed as a Linux Foundation project with light governance and a technical steering committee for the technical oversight of the project. The source code will be on GitHub with Gerrit code reviews and regular IRC meetings as well as meetups.
They were joined on stage by a special guest, Reddy Chagam, Chief Architect of SDS at Intel, who talked about Intel’s involvement in the project.
While the project hasn’t launched quite yet, stay tuned for more information about how to participate in OpenSDS. For now, you can watch the entire keynote below to learn more about the project!
