OpenStack & Nimble Storage ITO feature

Nimble Storage’s Cinder Driver includes a new feature called ITO – Image Transfer Optimization.

With most cinder backends, every time you deploy a new instance from an image, a volume/LUN gets created on the backend storage.
This means you might potentially use up a lot of space for data which is redundant.
In order to avoid unnecessary duplication of data, Nimble Storage introduced ITO – Image Transfer Optimization.

ITO will be helpful in cases where you might want to create 20 instances at a time from the same ISO.
With ITO, only one volume with the ISO will be created and then zero-copy clones will be utilized in order to boot the other 19 instances.
This seems to be the most space efficient way for deploying instances.

The benefits are simple:

• Instant Copy
• No duplicated data
• Shared Cache

Below, you can see the workflow for deploying instances without ITO enabled:

And here with ITO enabled:

Thanks to @wensteryu for the images.