External Storage Support (NetApp: FC, NFS, iSCSI)

StarlingX OpenStack integrates with NetApp storage arrays through the Cinder block storage service, letting you leverage existing NetApp infrastructure alongside or in place of the internal Ceph cluster. The NetApp Cinder driver communicates with ONTAP via its management API to handle volume provisioning, snapshots, cloning, and quality of service policies directly on the array.

Supported Transport Protocols

NetApp storage connects to StarlingX OpenStack using three transport protocols:

  • Fibre Channel (FC) — Delivers high-performance, low-latency block I/O over dedicated FC fabric. Best suited for workloads that demand predictable, high-throughput storage access.

  • NFS — Exposes NetApp volumes over an IP network. Cinder presents NFS-backed storage as persistent block volumes to virtual machines while the NetApp array manages the underlying data layout.

  • |iSCSI| — Encapsulates SCSI commands over IP networks, providing SAN-like block access without dedicated FC infrastructure. This makes it a practical choice for deployments that use standard Ethernet networking.

Key Capabilities

The NetApp Cinder integration provides:

Thin Provisioning

Volumes are thin-provisioned by default, enabling storage over commitment and more efficient use of physical disk resources.

Volume Snapshots and Cloning

Snapshot and clone operations offload to the NetApp array using native ONTAP snapshot and FlexClone technology, delivering near-instant operations with minimal storage overhead.

Multiple Storage Virtual Machines (SVMs)

The driver supports multiple ONTAP Storage Virtual Machines for multi-tenancy and traffic isolation at the storage layer.

Quality of Service (QoS)

Storage QoS policies map to ONTAP QoS policy groups, enforcing throughput or IOPS limits per Cinder volume type.

Backend Configuration

You can configure the NetApp backend as a Cinder volume backend alongside or in place of the internal Ceph backend. You can define multiple NetApp backends using different protocols or SVMs simultaneously and expose them to tenants through distinct Cinder volume types.

Note

NetApp external storage requires that the appropriate network connectivity (FC fabric or IP network) between StarlingX OpenStack hosts and the NetApp storage system is established and validated before you configure the Cinder backend.