Cinder volume driver for IBM SONAS and Storwize V7000 Unified Storage Systems

The IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (IBM SONAS) product manages vast repositories of information in enterprise environments that require very large capacities, high levels of performance, and high availability. The IBM SONAS system supports petabytes (PB) of storage and billions of files in a single large file system.
The IBM® Storwize® V7000 Unified system is a virtualizing RAID storage system that supports both block protocols and file protocols. This unified system includes the IBM Storwize V7000 File Module and the Storwize V7000 storage system. Underlying, both these storage products use IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS), which offers a number of specific features and optimizations for hosting master images, instances, and volumes. In particular, the "block-level format-agnostic copy-on-write mechanism enables quick volume provisioning" through snapshots.
This driver enables SONAS and Storewize V7000 Unified file modules to host storage which typically is useful in cases where the users prefer or predominantly make use of file based storage. The driver is modeled after existing cinder based drivers for network attached storage (NAS) available in open stack (wherein the driver creates sparse files on its filesystem (GPFS) and serves as block devices being exported via Network Filesystem (NFS)).

This driver implements required set of features for OpenStack Icehouse release, using the features of these storage products. It allows SONAS and IBM® Storwize® V7000 Unified filers to host storage for open stack environment by integrating with Openstack Cinder service. In subsequent releases the driver will be enhanced with additional functionality and also supported plus certified in future versions and flavors of IBM NAS product line.