StorPool update boasts tighter cloud platform integration

Software-defined storage firm StorPool Storage has released version 19.3 of its scale-out block storage platform, adding management features to its GUI and a range of updates including broader compatibility with NVMe SSDs.

StorPool’s platform runs on Linux and pools HDD and SSD resources across a cluster of commodity server boxes to provide a shared storage system. The latest version offers greater support for cloud platforms based on the Linux KVM hypervisor, and for containerised workloads as well as those running in virtual machines.

In fact, StorPool claims that customers can now streamline their IT operations by operating a single StorPool storage system across all the cloud platforms they have, such as OpenNebula, CloudStack, OpenStack and Kubernetes for container orchestration.

The firm states that automation capabilities in the plug-ins for each cloud platform enable customers to manage their clouds from that cloud’s user console, so the underlying StorPool storage system will automatically perform any required storage layer actions. Each virtual machine or container deployed will get automatically dedicated volumes in StorPool, for example.

On the management side, administrators can now use the StorPool GUI to perform basic management tasks like creating and resizing volumes, creating snapshots, and others. Remote Bridge Status Monitoring has been added, showing the status of connections between a given StorPool cluster and other StorPool clusters, with analytics dashboards that show the bridge traffic between clusters over time. 

This feature is to aid monitoring of multi-site deployments where many StorPool clusters replicate snapshots to one site, according to StorPool. It is also designed to help with large-scale deployments where tens of StorPool sub-clusters act as a single large-scale primary storage system presenting a unified global namespace.

In terms of integrations, StorPool has updated its support for OpenNebula, CloudStack, OpenStack and Kubernetes. The OpenNebula Addon now supports versions 5.12 and 6.0 of that platform, plus enhancements for security and to prevent data loss.

The CloudStack Plug-in adds support for CloudStack versions 4.11.3 to 4.15, and enables customers with CloudStack to use multiple StorPool Storage clusters as availability zones. With OpenStack, StorPool allows compute nodes to use the iSCSI protocol rather than the native StorPool Block Protocol, while admins can now take snapshots of Cinder volumes created from Glance images, and use them to deploy Nova instances. For Kubernetes, StorPool also now allows Kubernetes worker nodes to attach using the iSCSI protocol instead of the StorPool Block Protocol.

Hardware compatibility for NVMe SSDs has been expanded in this release by enabling storpool_nvmed to manage NVMe drives using the standard Linux vfio-pci driver, the firm said. StorPool has also confirmed compatibility with various NVMe SSDs, such asToshiba Cx5 NVMe, WD Ultrastar SN200, WD Gold NVMe WDS960G1D0D, HGST Ultrastar SN100, and Micron 9100 Pro.