Red Hat Brings Backup, Snapshots to OpenShift Container Storage
Open source enterprise software provider Red Hat has launched new capabilities for its OpenShift Container Storage, which works closely with its OpenShift Kubernetes platform, to provide its customers with enhanced data resilience features. Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.6 adds snapshots, OpenShift APIs for Data Protection (OADP), and support for the new functionality by three backup solutions, with several more on the way.
“If you look at traditional bare metal and even virtualized environments, the state was usually more often than not tightly coupled with the application. It resulted in a very monolithic architecture, which has a lot of benefits, for sure, particularly when you think about disaster recovery, backup, those types of topics. It’s a very easy architecture to understand, and how to handle things like consistency and backups,” explained Pete Brey, marketing manager of hybrid cloud object storage at Red Hat. “With Kubernetes, it’s very different because state is separated from the applications in persistent volumes.”
In recent times, said Brey, Kubernetes has moved from something developers might experiment with to something enterprises will run in production, and as such, those same enterprises have come to Red Hat looking for those same data resilience features that they have come to expect with their traditional application architectures and infrastructures.
“They want us to be more than just a storage provider,” said Brey. “They want us to provide data services — services around data resiliency, data security, data governance, data discovery, data cataloging, data efficiency.”
With Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.6, customizable, point-in-time snapshots and clones of persistent data volumes will be orchestrated by the Container Storage Interface (CSI), though Brey further clarified CSI and OpenShift Container Storage alone were not responsible for the full functionality. Rather, the application itself would need to manage consistency, by stopping I/O’s and flushing buffers before initiating the snapshot.
OpenShift Container Storage users will be able to access these data resilience features and configurations either through the OpenShift user interface or via the OpenShift APIs for Data Protection (OADP), which also enable Red Hat’s partner ecosystem to integrate their data protection solutions with OpenShift.
Enabling IT teams to use both their existing solutions and knowledge, said Brey, is a big part of this launch.
“Organizations are finally realizing this Kubernetes thing isn’t gonna go away. It’s real. Even DB2 databases now can run on Kubernetes. Your data protection team, all the knowledge, all the tools, all the infrastructure that they’ve built, that $3 million that they’ve invested — you don’t need to throw that away,” said Brey. “There’s a lot of distilled knowledge that IT organizations have on how to do a backup. We’re not going to ask you to throw away all that knowledge and relearn how to do backup and restore, for instance, with Kubernetes.
To this end, Brey said Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage launched with three storage vendors who will support the new functionality, including TrilioVault for Kubernetes, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, and Kasten K10, with several more on the way.
Looking forward, Brey said that the “business continuity and disaster recovery piece of the equation” would be the next focus, with Red Hat expecting to deliver new functionality around that in the next three months.
Red Hat is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.
