Choosing the Right Storage for Your Cloud

What is the right storage for your cloud?

OpenNebula provides a variety of ways for Virtual Machines and containers to access storage. It supports multiple traditional storage models including NAS, SAN, NFS, iSCSI, and Fiber Channel (FC), which allow virtualized applications to access storage resources in the same way as they would on a regular physical machine.

It also supports distributed Software-Defined Storage (SDS) models like Ceph, GlusterFS, StorPool, and LinStor, which allow you to create and scale elastic pools of storage and hyper-convergence deployments. 

Deciding which is the right storage backend for your cloud depends on your performance, scalability, and availability requirements; your existing storage infrastructure; your budget for new hardware, licenses, and support; and your skills and the IT staff you want to dedicate to its operation.

This report describes OneStor, a local direct-attached storage solution enhanced with caching, replica, and snapshotting mechanisms that have been specially designed for OpenNebula cloud infrastructures. OneStor brings significant benefits to any enterprise, with a clear reduction in complexity, resource consumption, and operational costs.

Choosing the Right Storage for Your Cloud by OpenNebula