Storage design

As compute hardware has become less expensive over the past few years, fewer and fewer workloads are constrained by a lack of processor or memory performance. Instead, most workloads are tuned so that they are constrained on I/O—particularly, storage I/O. OpenStack workloads typically separate the operating system storage from the application storage and Cinder, and the different object storage projects provide mechanisms to present many different kinds of storage with a single interface. This capability allows tenants to choose the storage that matches their application's requirements. In addition to Cinder providing persistence for applications, block storage and object storage also provide storage persistence for instances and allow instance live migration, backup, and recovery.