Case Study: Yahoo Japan Corporation achieves scalable OpenStack VM deployment and reduced storage costs with NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP

Yahoo Japan Adopts Clustered Data ONTAP as a New OpenStack Infrastructure for Service Developments. Deploying Multiple VMs While Reducing Storage Costs

Yahoo Japan, operator of the country’s largest portal, faced rapid service growth that strained its private cloud: exploding numbers of virtual machines, rising operational management overhead, and the need for a more flexible, scalable infrastructure that could support OpenStack and reliable storage integration. The company needed non‑stop operations, efficient hardware scaling, and a way to host thousands more VMs without ballooning storage costs.

Yahoo deployed OpenStack alongside NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 (four-node FAS3220AE) using the NetApp Unified Driver for Cinder, NFS access, FlexClone virtual cloning, Flash Cache and SnapMirror for protection. The solution supports roughly 20,000 VMs in production, delivers high disk utilization and lower storage consumption through cloning, provides high availability and backup options, and positions Yahoo to scale toward 50,000 VMs while improving QoS and disaster‑recovery capabilities.

Yahoo Japan Corporation

Daisuke Masaki

Systems Management Group Site Operations Headquarters Infrastructure Technology Department 3, Storage