Hewlett-Packard Co. has contributed the code for some of its most important storage innovations to the latest “Kilo” release of OpenStack in a bid to make the cloud operating system more appealing to enterprises. The donation that will perhaps be most appreciated by the upstream community is the flash-based caching engine from its 3PAR arrays.

Adaptive Flash Cache was first unveiled last September with the promise of helping organizations spend less on storage by supplementing the expensive DRAM used to keep frequently needed information readily accessible with more affordable but equally speedy solid-state memory. Such setups can be be made even more cost-efficient using the compression technology that has been introduced in conjunction with this announcement.

Thin Deduplication with Express Indexing is a homegrown spin on the tried-and-true approach of eliminating redundant data to save space that HP says can not only significantly improve the utilization of flash but also increase the lifespan of drives by up to 75 percent in the process. Organizations can leverage that capacity using the scheduling engine that the vendor is releasing to complement its other contributions.

Evaluator Scheduler automates the allocation of resources through a request-response model wherein applications specify their own requirements instead of relegating that logistical work to the underlying infrastructure as has traditionally been done. That’s the favored approach for the kind of highly scalable distributed workloads that OpenStack has been created to run.

As a result, HP’s contributions make the cloud framework that much more attractive to organizations that are considering embarking upon such development projects. And that in turn should buy the company a bigger presence – and more importantly, a bigger say – in the upstream project, an important asset in the long run as CEO Meg Whitman works to promote its emerging OpenStack-based infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

But at the same time, HP still very much wants organizations to use its arrays, which is why the most strategic innovations to have come out of the 3PAR division recently are still being kept close to chest. Standing out in particular is Express Writes, an optimization that the company says can squeeze up to 30 percent more IOPS out of flash and increase throughput while cutting latency by 10 percent.

HP is making it easy for organizations to hook up their 3PAR arrays to OpenStack through new support for the Manila file storage component. That allows administrators to manage the appliances through the same interface as other hardware.