NetApp Facilitates File Share as a Service for Cloud; Bolsters OpenStack Capabilities

TOKYO: NetApp, a provider of storage and data management solutions, announces the availability of production ready Manila for enterprises. With the latest announcement enterprises can now move their shared volumes between private and public clouds.

Manila, the OpenStack’s file-share service for the cloud provides an automated, on-demand and scalable service for delivering shared and distributed file systems using an open, standardized API developed within OpenStack community. Organizations can now build and enhance a cloud-ready data center with capabilities of handling business-critical and content management applications. Manila will be available in the OpenStack Liberty release. It is designed to permit modular use with another cloud stacks.

Most of the business critical applications relyon shared file systems. Lack of file sharing capability in the cloud environment, users turned to alternatives which weighed heavy on time and complex configurations. With Manila, users can now seamlessly share files across the cloud. It works with custom and Trove-based services to automate database deployment. The solution is optimal as storage for development and test environments that scale to thousands of nodes accessing a common set of source files, binaries and other resources.

Manila offers scalability and performance required for Big Data applications that need high throughput to compute nodes. It supports custom and Sahara-based analytics “as a service” capabilities to automate access across nodes to distributed file system facilitating map-reduce workloads. Administrators can now create a file system accessible by individuals across an organization and establish permission for users and groups at the file or directory level.

“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,” says Phil Brotherton, VP, Data Fabric Group, NetApp.