Cinder still No. 1 OpenStack storage project, but Manila interest picks up

Cinder still has the highest adoption rate among OpenStack storage projects, but interest in the nascent Manila file-share service is picking up, according to a 2016 user survey released this month by the OpenStack Foundation.

The survey showed that 57% of 290 deployers who answered the adoption question use OpenStack Cinder block storage in production, and another 26% are testing it. OpenStack Swift object storage was in production use at 32% of the deployments, with another 21% using it in test mode.

The emerging Manila shared file system had production deployments among only 3% of respondents and test usage at 8%. But Manila is generating lots of interest. Only the Magnum containers service (44%) and Designate DNS service (41%) generated more mentions than Manila (38%) among the 290 respondents who rated the OpenStack projects they’re most interested in.

“We’re starting to see a handful of big deployments move past the ‘kicking the tires’ phase and deploy Manila in production. The number of new users trying Manila is also more than I can count,” said Ben Swartzlander, the OpenStack Manila project team lead and a senior software engineer at NetApp.

The OpenStack Foundation’s volunteer survey generated responses from 1,603 community members representing 1,111 unique organizations and 405 user deployments. The IT industry dominated the survey pool, at 68%, following by telecommunications (14%), academic/research (9%), financial (2%) and film/media (2%). The number of users responding to specific questions varied.

The top priority for most respondents is saving money over alternative infrastructure choices, and the majority of deployments are in on-premise private clouds.

More than 75% of 256 respondents use between five and nine OpenStack projects. Looking at OpenStack storage, 20% of 312 respondents said they use the open source software in production for storage/backup/archiving purposes. Another 5% use it for development/quality assurance, and 3% are involved in proofs of concept.

The top Cinder driver in production use among 260 respondents was Ceph RBD followed by the default logical volume manager (LVM) for Linux (16%), NetApp (8%), NFS (5%), GlusterFS (5%), SolidFire (4%) and VMware VMDK (3%).

And there are some sizable Cinder block storage deployments. About 9% of 148 respondents have more than 1 PB, including . The Cinder breakdown for the rest was:

19% – 100 TB to 999 TB
38% – 10 TB to 99 TB
24% – 9 TB or less

Among the OpenStack Swift respondents, the breakdown was as follows:

4% – 1 PB to 99 PB
20% – 100 TB to 999 TB
25% – 10 TB to 99 TB
51% – 9 TB or less

Asked what kinds of data they plan to store on object storage in the next 12 months, the respondents said:

68% – backup/archiving
60% – Docker/container/VM images
58% – application data
32% – big data
3% – other