At the OpenStack Summit this week NetApp submitted a prototype and proposal for consideration by the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee and the unity at-large for file share service capabilities.
OpenStack doesn’t have native management support for file-based storage systems so NetApp is proposing to add a file-share service broad enough to address a range of file system types in the next Havana release of OpenStack.
It says it got good feedback for its blueprint during the previous Grizzly development cycle and its proposal is abstracted to address any number of shared or distributed file system types from CIFS and NFS/pNFS to Gluster or Ceph.
The widgetry, it says, could either be an extension to the existing Cinder project (currently referred to as OpenStack block storage) or implemented as a separate project.
The point of the integration is to extend access to applications written for file-based storage without needing a separate management interface.