StorPool Distributed Storage

Introduction

StorPool is distributed data storage software running on standard x86 servers. StorPool aggregates the performance and capacity of all drives into a shared pool of storage distributed among the servers. Within this storage pool the user creates thin-provisioned volumes that are exposed to the clients as block devices. StorPool consists of two parts wrapped in one package - a server and a client. The StorPool server allows a hypervisor to act as a storage node, while the StorPool client allows a hypervisor node to access the storage pool and act as a compute node. In OpenStack terms the StorPool solution allows each hypervisor node to be both a storage and a compute node simultaneously.

Concepts

In a StorPool cluster the user data is stored in virtual volumes managed in a transparent way by the StorPool servers. When needed, a volume is attached to a client host using the StorPool client device driver and exposed to processes running on the host as a block device.

Components

Hosts that will use the StorPool volumes only need to run the storpool_beacon (StorPool cluster presence and quorum) and the storpool_block (StorPool block device client) services.

On a hyperconverged setup, the hosts will also run the storpool_server (StorPool data storage) and storpool_mgmt (StorPool management API) services. On setups with differentiated storage and client hosts, these services will only need to run on the storage cluster.