NetApp’s Contributions To OpenStack

NetApp’s Contributions To OpenStack

A suite of NetApp drivers for OpenStack Block Storage (aka Cinder) are built into the Icehouse release of OpenStack available from http://www.openstack.org/software/start/.

NetApp has provided enhancements to the OpenStack Compute Service (Nova) and OpenStack Image Service (Glance) projects to enhance instance creation and storage efficiency as well. NetApp has also published a reference architecture for deploying OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) on top of NetApp’s E-Series storage solutions (deprecated from Rocky release) that reduces the overall deployment footprint and replication overhead.

NetApp additionally leads a development effort within the OpenStack community to introduce a new core storage service developed under the project name Manila, which adds a shared file system service to the existing block and object storage services. This addresses a critical gap in OpenStack’s storage services coverage and enables a new category of on-demand file storage for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployments. Refer to Shared Filesystems Service (Manila) for more information on Manila.

Where possible, NetApp intends to (and has to date) contribute integrations upstream in OpenStack directly. NetApp’s direct contributions to OpenStack date back to the Essex release.