Rackspace Hosting on Tuesday unveiled technology to host block storage on OpenStack clouds.
The new offering, Rackspace Cloud Block Storage, allows customers to access multiple volumes of storage based on either hard drive or high-performance SSDs separate from their cloud-based compute resources, said Mark Interrante, vice president of products for San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace.
"For customers looking to manage large amounts of data associated with their compute resources, this lets them be more flexible and better able to take advantage of the cloud," Interrante said. "And it's more flexible than using host-based storage for applications like MySQL."
[Related: Cloud Storage For All: How To Build Your Own Practice]
Rackspace Cloud Block Storage is based on the "Cinder" OpenStack Block Storage project for building a detachable storage framework, Interrante said.
"Before Cinder, OpenStack storage was embedded in the compute," he said. "The new Folsom release of OpenStack separated storage from compute to allow provisioning of storage and compute as independent services."
With Rackspace Cloud Block Storage, customers can provision multiple volumes of storage, each of which has a maximum capacity of up to 1 TB, Interrante said.
Pricing for the new technology is transparent, with customers paying 15 cents per GB per month for storage volumes configured using spinning hard drives and 70 cents per GB per month using SSDs, with no extra fees for I/O or per-instance provisioning, he said. However, there is a 10 cents per GB per month charge for snapshot data.
Those volumes provide a more consistent performance than previous methods of handling block storage in OpenStack clouds because of APIs that let application providers take advantage of the technology instead of needing to write code for each application to handle the storage tasks, Interrante said.
Beta testing of Rackspace Cloud Block Storage has been going on since April.
PUBLISHED OCT. 23, 2012
