Private STaaS with OpenStack Cinder Volumes for Hybrid/Multi-cloud

Abstract

Storage as a Service (STaaS) is in a very advanced stage and 80-90% of the users trust and use public cloud storage. However, enterprises and communities are still skeptical and are concerned with data safety and theft, and are investing to build their own private storage system, where cost of storage space is not the most important concern. This limits resource (compute and network) scale at the peak on demand in hybrid/multi-cloud environment as one cannot keep buying and upgrading computing hardware resources to support peak workloads in private cloud [9]. There are commercial solutions offered by few public cloud service providers/brokers to maintain the data in a private cloud in a hybrid environment, but this may have vendor/broker lock-in and portability/migration issues. In this paper, we explore OpenStack cloud for private Storage as a Service in hybrid/multi-cloud environment and demonstrate with our framework (middleware), which is built upon OpenStack [16], an open source cloud and by leveraging existing OpenStack functionalities.