Don’t Leave Storage Until Last: How Your Backend Shapes RHOSO Distributed Zone Resilience

Red Hat’s RHOSO distributed zones multiply every storage decision by three. Here’s why backend choice is more consequential here than in any single-site deployment.

Migrate Cinder Volumes with Snapshots Between FlashArrays

Cinder refuses to migrate a volume that has snapshots — full stop. Here is a practical Ansible-based workaround for Everpure FlashArray environments that preserves your snapshot history as independently recoverable volumes, keeps the workload attached throughout, and leaves a manifest you can use months later to restore to any point in time. The problem You […]

The Memory Crisis Is Making Your Ceph Deployment More Expensive Than You Think

DRAM prices have risen over 100% in a single quarter. SSDs are not far behind. For storage teams eyeing a Ceph rollout, the timing couldn’t be worse — and the math may now favour a different approach entirely. For years, Ceph has been the go-to answer for organisations that want scalable, open-source storage without the […]

Why 3-Site Replication in OpenStack Cinder Is a DORA Game-Changer for EU Organizations

The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is forcing a fundamental rethink of infrastructure design in financial services. It is no longer sufficient to have backup plans or theoretical disaster recovery procedures. Regulators now expect provable, testable, and continuously enforced resilience — particularly around data. Traditional approaches to infrastructure resilience have always involved a tradeoff. Synchronous replication […]

Ceph and Digital Sovereignty: Why Open Source Isn’t Enough

There’s a seductive shortcut in the digital sovereignty conversation: if software is open source, it must be sovereign. No vendor lock-in. No proprietary black boxes. Community governed. That reasoning gets you to Ceph — the dominant open source distributed storage platform — pretty quickly. It’s also mostly wrong. Sovereignty isn’t a licensing question. It’s a […]

Migrating OpenStack Cinder Volumes from Ceph to Everpure

Your storage infrastructure needs to evolve. Your workloads shouldn’t have to notice. OpenStack Cinder’s backend abstraction is one of its most powerful features — volumes remain just volumes, regardless of what’s sitting underneath them. But when you need to actually move data from one backend to another — say, from Ceph RBD to a Everpure […]

OpenStack Cinder Volume Migration: Moving Between Backends

In the previous posts I explored how the Cinder scheduler interprets capabilities, extra_specs, and how multiple backends can intentionally share the same volume_backend_name to present a unified storage tier. That abstraction is powerful — but it also introduces an operational question: How do you move an existing volume between two backends when the scheduler treats […]

Multiple Arrays, One Backend Name: Horizontal Scaling in OpenStack Cinder

Scaling Horizontally with Multiple Arrays, One Backend Name In Part 1, I covered the fundamentals of intent-based volume types: how to use capabilities and filters to let the Cinder scheduler match workload requirements with backend characteristics. We described storage infrastructure, defined workload personas, and let the scheduler do the matching. But there’s a powerful scaling […]

OpenStack Cinder Scheduling: How to Stop Hard-Coding Storage Tiers

From Hardware Names to Workload Intent The Cinder scheduler doesn’t get much love. Most people see it as boring infrastructure plumbing. But when you lean into its design, something interesting happens: it becomes a decision engine that quietly translates intent into placement, without hard-coding tiers or baking policy into application logic. This is the first […]

Integrating Pure Storage FlashBlade S3 with OpenStack: A Practical Guide

Integrating Pure Storage FlashBlade as an object store in OpenStack environments presents unique challenges when bypassing Swift. This guide walks through a practical architecture that uses permanent S3 tokens and external Identity and Access Management (IAM) to provide OpenStack users with direct, secure access to FlashBlade buckets while maintaining fine-grained access control. Understanding the Architecture […]