The NetApp OpenStack team will be in attendance at the Design Summit & Conference in San Diego next week. We'll be leading a discussion about how best to add canonical support for shared file systems in OpenStack. An abstract of our session:
Today, OpenStack has support for block-based storage and object storage, but there is no explicit support for file-based storage. For certain applications, file-based storage has significant advantages over block storage and object storage, and a large amount of existing software is designed around file-based storage. We've heard demand from the operator community for a common management interface for file-based storage, and ideally, a common management interface for storage in general. We're proposing adding management of CIFS and NFS file sharing to OpenStack, and we believe that extending Cinder is the most logical way to achieve this, both because Cinder is already in the business of managing storage devices, and because users don’t desire yet another management interface. NetApp has developed a prototype to this end. It includes extended APIs as well as an implementation of a driver backend for Cinder. We'd like to unveil our progress and discuss these with the developer and user communities to see if this approach makes sense, and achieve consensus on a path forward.
http://openstacksummitfall2012.sched.org/event/d50a7bb50c695d6d21b1041ac17d75aa#.UHY_NbRAFD4
We'll be sure to update the discussion here with the outcome / direction decided upon by the community.
