Google's Cloud Gets an OpenStack Backup Driver
The thirteenth version of the OpenStack cloud platform, Mitaka, has just arrived, and right on its heels, Google announced in a blog post that the Mitaka release includes a native option to back up OpenStack Cinder storage volumes to its public cloud.
Cinder is used in many OpenStack deployments to house virtual machine data and other data at rest. OpenStack includes a native backup driver that permits Cinder to be backed up to various storage platforms. Now, Google cloud users can choose the native backup option for Cinder as a seamless choice.
As Network World noted:
"The move further differentiates Google’s IaaS public cloud from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure when it comes to supporting OpenStack. Google joined the OpenStack Foundation last year and has been working on integrating its open source container manager named Kubernetes into OpenStack. Now, in the Mitaka release of OpenStack (the 13th version of the open source code) Google is integrating its standard public cloud storage, as well as its less-expensive Nearline storage service. Google sees OpenStack private cloud users as potential public cloud customers. AWS and Azure have much more tepid relations with OpenStack."
Google's post notes:
"OpenStack Mitaka has just launched and we’re super excited about it. In collaboration with Red Hat and Biarca, we’ve developed an OpenStack Cinder backup driver for Google Cloud Storage, available in the Mitaka release...Backup and recovery services represent one of the most costly and complex aspects of large scale infrastructure management. OpenStack provides an efficient mechanism for allocation and management of persistent block storage through Cinder. In an OpenStack deployment, Cinder volumes house virtual machine data at rest as well as, potentially, the operating system boot device. In production deployments, it’s critical that this persistent data is protected as part of a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. To satisfy this requirement, Cinder provides a backup service that includes a backup driver specification allowing storage vendors to add support for additional backup targets."
"This is where we come in. The addition of highly durable and available cloud-scale object storage allows organizations to shift from bulk commodity storage for backup to a more operationally efficient and cost-effective architecture, all while avoiding additional capital expenditures and the complexity of managing storage device scale out."
The Cinder backup driver works with any class of Cloud Storage, including the Google Cloud Storage Nearline archival option.