Storage architecture

Contents


o Block Storage (cinder)
o Object Storage (swift)
o Image storage (glance)
o Ephemeral storage (nova)

OpenStack has multiple storage realms to consider:

 Block Storage (cinder)

 Object Storage (swift)
 Image storage (glance)
 Ephemeral storage (nova)

Block Storage (cinder)¶

The Block Storage (cinder) service manages volumes on storage devices in an environment.
In a production environment, the device presents storage via a storage protocol (for example,
NFS, iSCSI, or Ceph RBD) to a storage network (br-storage) and a storage management
API to the management network (br-mgmt). Instances are connected to the volumes via the
storage network by the hypervisor on the Compute host.

The following diagram illustrates how Block Storage is connected to instances.

The diagram shows the following steps.

1.A volume is created by the assigned cinder-volume service using the appropriate cinder
driver. The volume is created by using an API that is presented to the management network.
2.After the volume is created, the nova-compute service connects the Compute host
hypervisor to the volume via the storage network.
3.After the hypervisor is connected to the volume, it presents the volume as a local hardware
device to the instance.