Unleashing the OpenStack “Train”: Contribution from Intel and Inspur

The OpenStack community released the latest version, “Train”, on October 16th. As Platinum and Gold members of OpenStack Foundation, Intel and Inspur OpenStack teams are actively contributing to the community projects, such as Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Cyborg, and others. During the Train development cycle, both companies collaborated, contributed to and completed multiple achievements. This includes 4 blueprints and design specifications in Train, commits, reviews and more, and reflects the high level of contribution to the development of OpenStack code base.

In early September 2019, Intel and Inspur worked together and used the InCloud OpenStack 5.6 (ICOS 5.6) to validate a single cluster deployment with 200 and 500 nodes. This created a solid foundational reference architecture for OpenStack in a large-scale single cluster environment. Intel and Inspur closely monitor the latest development updates in the community and upgraded ICOS5.6 to support new features of Train. For example, while validating the solution, a networking bottleneck issue (Neutron IPAM DLM and IP address allocation) was found in a large-scale high concurrency provisioning scenario (e.g. >800 VM creation). After applying a distributed lock solution with etcd, the network creation process was optimized and significantly improved system performance. The team also worked on Nova project to provide “delete on termination” feature for VM volumes. This greatly improves operation efficiency for cloud administrators. Another important new feature “Nova VPMEM” is also included in OpenStack “Train” release. This feature can guarantee persistent data storage functionality across power cycles, at a lower cost and larger capacity compared to DRAM. This can significantly improve workload performance for applications such as Redis, Rocksdb, SAP HANA, Aerospike, etc.

Intel and Inspur shared many of the engineering best practices at the recent Shanghai Open Infrastructure Summit, including resources for 500 node large-scale cluster deployment in relevant sessions such as “full stack security chain of trust and best practices in cloud”, “improving private cloud performance for big data analytics workloads”, and more.

Chief Architect of Intel Data Center Group, Enterprise & Government for China Division, Dr Yih Leong Sun said: Intel is actively contributing to the OpenStack upstream community and will continue to improve OpenStack architecture with Intel’s latest technology. We strive to build a software defined infrastructure, optimized at both the software and hardware layer, and to deliver an Open Cloud solution that meets the workload performance requirements of the industry.

Vice President of Inspur Group, Zhang Dong indicated: Inspur is increasingly investing more on upstream community and contributing our knowledge and experience with industry deployment and usage. We continue to strengthen our technical leadership and contribution in the community, to help users solve real-world challenges, and to promote the OpenStack adoption.

Photo // CC BY NC

Tags: Collaboration Without Boundaries, Inspur, Intel, Open Infrastructure Summit Shanghai, Train

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Brin Zhang

Cloud Architect at Inspur

Brin Zhang works on OpenStack Community since the Rocky release. He devotes himself to the community and application promotion. He has deeply involved in OpenStack Nova, Cinder, Glance and Cyborg, etc. projects, and he is a core member/reviewer in the OpenStack Cyborg project, and help FPGA driver, NVMe SSD driver, and other drivers to achieve. His hobbies are playing badminton, reading books and listening to music.