NetApp Expands OpenStack Capabilities With Production-Ready Manila File Share as a Service

NetApp, Inc. announced that Manila is production ready for the mainstream enterprise.

With Manila, enterprises can build or enhance a cloud-ready data center capable of handling business-critical and content-management applications. Customers can support storage and test environments while enabling big data scale and performance as data moves freely between clouds.

As the founder of the Manila project and a charter member of the OpenStack Foundation, the company has contributed expertise and technology that enable application developers to choose the best cloud storage model for their applications. Developers also benefit from the flexibility of shared file systems to interact with data. Because file shares can be offered as a service, they can be self-served and migrated, no matter whether the cloud is on or off the premises or is private or public. As a result, cloud users and applications can self-provision and manage shared file systems for the first time.

Company’s contributions to Manila, developed as a component of OpenStack, provide an automated, on-demand, scalable service for delivering shared and distributed file systems using an open, standardized API developed within the OpenStack community. Historically, shared volumes couldn’t be provisioned as a service in the cloud, and, as a result, they couldn’t be migrated. With Manila, shared volumes can now flow freely between public and private clouds. Available in the OpenStack Liberty release, Manila has been engineered to allow modular use with other cloud stacks. In addition, Manila enables choice in back-end options, a result of company’s outreach to the open-source storage community.

“A lack of file share as a service for cloud was an enormous gap in OpenStack functionality. Now that Manila has matured to production-ready status, our Data ONTAP customers can deploy file share services for their cloud apps. This further enables simple access and use of data across the cloud data fabric,” said Phil Brotherton, VP, data fabric group, NetApp.

Leveraging cloud-ready capabilities of clustered data ONTAP
Company’s clustered Data ONTAP storage software is the driver for Manila. The software brings best-in-class data management capabilities to OpenStack cloud deployments, increasing efficiency, availability, and scalability. Customers benefit from multi-tenant controls and data protection over the entire data lifecycle.

Manila bridges traditional workloads to cloud
Many of the most critical business applications, regardless of environment, rely on shared file systems. Prior to Manila, file sharing was not available in cloud environments, and alternatives were time consuming and difficult to configure. Manila enables users to quickly and easily create and benefit from a service-oriented architecture:

• Database as a service: Manila works with both custom and Trove-based services to automate database deployment.

• Development environments, large group processing, large distributed applications: Manila is ideal as storage for development and test environments that can scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes accessing a common set of source files, binaries, and other resources.

• Content repositories: Manila delivers a durable, high-throughput file system for content-management systems that store and serve information for a range of applications, such as websites, online publications, and archives.

• Big data: Manila provides the scale and performance required for big data applications that need high throughput to compute nodes coupled with read-after-write consistency and low-latency file operations.

• Analytics: Manila supports custom and Sahara-based analytics ‘as a service’ capabilities to automate access across nodes to distributed file systems to facilitate map-reduce workloads.

• Virtual desktops, home directories, departmental collaboration: Manila provides storage for organizations with many users who need access to and share common datasets. Administrators can use Manila to create a file system accessible by individuals across an organization and establish permissions for users and groups at the file or directory level. In addition, Manila facilitates departmental cross-client OS platform collaboration.

Visit company’s GitHub site for OpenStack documentation, source code, blogs, and more.
More about NetApp and OpenStack Manila.