Hey gtaylor, I can tell you that this was purely a coincidence. We actually were going to ship this a couple of weeks ago but decided to delay a few days to get some updates from OpenStack. I think what happen yesterday is unfortunate for all those customers who were affected and certainly not cause for celebration. We do believe however that we have a great block storage service to offer and are looking forward to competing.
Glad to see competition heating up. We all win from this.
Hi epistasis, here is what I can say. Let's talk about two things: what happens at provisioning time and then what happens at runtime.
Our provisioning engine is based on OpenStack Cinder. At provisioning time, we provision a SSD or Standard volume on our storage backend. This storage backend is a storage system we built (called Lunr) on top of standard Linux and commercially available hardware. Once the volume is created in Lunr it is then attached to the Cloud Server compute host, which exposes the volume to the guest as a virtual device.
At runtime, the volume appears as a regular device to the compute node over iSCSI. Snapshots are created against Cloud Files, our object storage service that is based on OpenStack Swift.
I hope that is useful.