Cinder provides OpenStack with the persistent block storage services needed for a cloud. It acts as a storage as a service for uses cases such as databases and dynamically growing file systems, including data lakes, which are of particular importance in streaming IoT scenarios. Like other components in OpenStack, the storage system is itself dynamic and scales as needed. The architecture is built on high availability and open standards.  

The functionality provided by Cinder includes:

• Creation, deletion, and binding of storage devices to Nova compute instances
• Multiple storage vendor interoperability (HP 3PAR, EMC, IBM, Ceph, CloudByte, Scality)
• Support for multiple interfaces (Fibre Channel, NFS, Shared SAS, IBM GPFS, iSCSI)
• Backup and retrieval of disk images
• Snapshot images of a points in time
• Alternative storage for VM images