In most cases, existing enterprise applications cannot be easily modified to take advantage of these new cloud technologies. The OpenStack Cinder project can expose storage volumes to instances; however the default open source implementation limits your data’s resiliency to the RAID protection of a single server.

To provide more resilient storage options, Rackspace has certified private clouds running on EMC and NetApp storage platforms in order to capitalize on your existing enterprise storage investment. We have written implementation guides for each certified storage platform in our Private Cloud Knowledge Center. Those articles detail setting up a Rackspace Private Cloud on top of those storage platforms and cover the architectures and the ideas behind them.

As we certify more platforms and solutions, look out for additional implementation guides about more plugin providers as well as emerging storage technologies in the cloud.

You can read the implementation details in the following documents, and can view all our tech resources at the Private Cloud Tech Center.

Implementing OpenStack Cinder with EMC Storage on the Rackspace Private Cloud Software
An implementation guide for configuring Rackspace Private Cloud Software to utilize EMC VNX or VMAX enclosures as a storage target for Cinder volumes.

Implementing OpenStack Cinder with NetApp Storage on the Rackspace Private Cloud Software
An implementation guide to configuring Rackspace Private Cloud Software to utilize NetApp Enclosures running OnTap 8.1 as a target for Cinder volumes.

Building a Rackspace Private Cloud with Linux iSCSI Volumes
An implementation guide to building a Rackspace Private Cloud with external storage that targets Enterprise IT applications. Volumes are provided via the Cinder volume service running on Linux server head units.

Swift comes with many interesting features and capabilities, one of which is is the ability to sync the contents of one container to another container, either within the same cluster or a completely different cluster. On the surface, it looks like a simple feature, but has interesting implications.

Container-sync to Rackspace Cloud Files from private Swift cluster

Let’s talk about how you can use this simple feature to sync or migrate your data from one cloud to another.

Say you have a private Swift Cluster in your East Coast data center. Since Swift is multi-tenant, you can sync the container of one account to a container on another account, or you can migrate a container to a completely different account.

For example, suppose you have another private Swift cluster, say, in a West Coast data center. Although Swift stores multiple copies of data (three copies by default) in different zones; if your entire East Coast data center is down, you can still lose access to the data for prolonged periods of time. If you really want to ensure that your data survives a data center outage, you can mirror the containers from the East Coast data center to the West Coast data center. This is especially useful when your data is sensitive and you cannot allow it to reside outside of your own data centers.

If, however, you want geographic redundancy for non-sensitive data in your private Swift cloud, you can configure the containers to sync to Rackspace Cloud Files.

By syncing your data to Cloud Files, your data will be served from a different geographical location when your primary data center goes down. In addition, you can enable features like a content delivery network (CDN), so you can serve your data globally at blazing speeds.

Please refer to the container-sync article for details on how it works and how you can take advantage of it.

As more Swift clusters are built around the world in both public and private clouds, container-sync provides an easy way to mirror or migrate data between two independent Swift clusters.

This illustrates the power of open source and having all of your clouds speak to the same open standards; and it’s just the beginning.

You can read more about Container Syncing in Swift in this article, and can view all our tech resources at the Private Cloud Tech Center.