Cinder - block storage service

Inspired by Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) offering, Cinder allows users to create volumes that can be mounted as devices by Nova instances.

Cinder volumes behave as if they were raw unformatted hard drives. Once data is written to these volumes, the data persists even after terminating the instance or an instance failure. This is because the written data is stored on a dedicated Cinder storage server, not the compute nodes where the instances reside. Cinder also supports snapshots which capture the current state of a volume. These are useful for providing backup protection, and they can also be used to instantiate new volumes that contain the exact data of the snapshot. You can also write images to a block storage devices for compute to use as a bootable persistent instance.