NetApp unified block storage driver

The current netapp block storage drivers are divided based on the technology(nfs/iscsi and different storage families) used across multiple classes. This poses a problem or confusion at the end user level about which driver to configure and which one is the recommended one from netapp with recommended options. It also causes documentation mess as multiple driver classes which are growing during the period of time are required to be mentioned as part of the documentation and also configured at cinder backend at the time of usage.

The NetApp unified driver attempts to solve this problem by providing a single entry point driver class for different netapp storage families and storage protocols and can be configured with simple options. It is required to be built in a plug in style architecture to ease registering existing and new drivers without any significant code change. It gives the opportunity to provide recommended/default driver options while configuring a driver backend for cinder using a single netapp driver without the need to remember weird class names.