From the ‘cloud storage’ files:
The first time I ever heard of the Manila project was at the recent OpenStack Atlanta summit. I had planned to sit in on the Manila session, but the room was overflowing and I wasn’t allowed in, which was very disappointing.
The OpenStack Foundation however does a fantastic job of taping and publicly posting its Summit session and I’ve since had the chance to view the whole session (check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR-X7jbG5QM).
So what is Manilla? It’s an OpenStack File Share service project, sponsored by Red Hat and NetApp.
More importantly, Manila is now an officially incubated project within the OpenStack Foundation. As an incubated project, Manila could one day land as an official integrated project, though don’t look for that until at least 2015.
“Stated simply, the goal of the Manila project is to do for shared filesystem storage what Cinder has done for blocks storage,” the Manila project’s incubation application states. “We aim to provide a vendor neutral management interface that allows for provisioning and attaching shared filesystems such as NFS, CIFS, and more.”
To the extent possible we aim to mirror the architecture of Cinder, with support for a public REST API, multiple backends, and a scheduler that performs resource assignment decisions.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist