28 Oct Integrating OpenShift and ionir to Improve Data Agility and Resilience in the Cloud
Kirby Wadsworth
Kirby has more than two decades of marketing leadership in both publicly traded large enterprises and emerging startups. As a founder and early venture executive with several successful exits, Kirby helped pioneer the cloud storage, continuous data protection, and file virtualization industries.
Kubernetes is rapidly becoming the platform of choice for many customers. The latest Redhat Enterprise Open-Source Report suggests 85% of enterprises agree that Kubernetes is key to cloud-native application strategies. Application modernization and redesign is critical to adopting containers as an infrastructure building block. Kubernetes was designed to run stateless applications, but not all workloads are born equal. As the industry embraces Kubernetes, new workloads that require state (A.K.A. persistent data) are introduced to Kubernetes, often leaving customers with more questions than answers.
Experience End-to-End Data Management Capabilities with ionir
ionir is a container-native storage and data management platform for Kubernetes that vastly simplifies the equation, especially when deployed on OCP. ionir virtualizes all available storage in a Kubernetes cluster to create a single pool of highly scalable storage. Having a Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin and an Operator under OCP, ionir storage is provisioned and managed by OCP Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) within the OperatorHub. Of course, ionir is available from the Red Hat Container Catalog.
In addition to providing resilient, high-performance storage, ionir also provides end-to-end data management capabilities. The ionir architecture separates the metadata from the data, which enables unique data management capabilities such as instant clones, instant volume copy between clusters, and clone to time, which instantly creates cloned volumes at specific 1-sec RPOs. ionir is built using a microservices architecture, providing a unified data platform that is elastic, scalable, and agile — just the data layer that containerized deployments require.
Overcoming Data Challenges by Making Data as Agile as Applications
Kubernetes data should be as agile as Kubernetes applications. As mentioned in Redhat global tech outlook report for 2021, 38% of enterprises already run in hybrid or multi-cloud. Attributes like scalability, automation, simplicity and the ability to move data anywhere in seconds are key for a successful deployment. In addition, Kubernetes is all about quick actions and decision-making. Continuous integration and continuous deployments, for example, require fast cloning, versioning and access to data from different sources and environments, on-prem or in the cloud.
Effective Data Management Improves Data Agility
When discussing data, databases are top of mind. MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and others are making their way into customers’ Kubernetes clusters as first-class citizens, using operators and other techniques to adjust to the new container world. Since pods are ephemeral by design, these operators manage scheduling, failover, and other configurations required to make the pods operate with minimal downtime and operations overhead. But what about the data?
The ionir Data Services Platform for Kubernetes manages your workload’s data. ionir aggregates all local media on your worker nodes to a highly available, high-speed distributed storage system. All volumes get automatically replicated, meaning if a worker node crashes, your data is accessible anywhere in the cluster instantaneously. No need for excessive replicas and complex application-level replication — ionir does the heavy lifting for you by lowering CAPEX and OPEX costs with a click of a button. Additional expected immediate savings by ionir’s one-of-a-kind and best-in-class cluster-wide inline deduplication ensures redundant blocks are discarded, lowering costs on storage resources.
Another unmatched capability ionir holds is the ability to expedite building local and remote replicas — migrations between clouds and locations in seconds. ionir moves and copies data between Kubernetes platforms with global deduplication. Meaning, if required blocks are already present at the target site, no transfer will be performed, leading to great network egress charges reduction. With ionir, your replica instance will be available in seconds for read/write operations no matter the size or distance, thanks to ionir’s revolutionary data management approach.
This is true to other data-focused workloads like observability and logging solutions like Prometheus and ELK, messaging queues like Kafka, and others all require data persistence by design. Instead of investing resources in managing the data and running additional replicas to support HA, ionir protects and enables data while compressing and deduplicating for efficiency.
Final Thoughts
Working closely with OpenShift, ionir has fine-tuned its platform for optimal performance, data protection, scalability and ease of use. Offering an out-of-the-box solution on OCP, ionir installs in minutes, and is fully configurable using standard K8s tools.
Begin your free trial to discover how the ionir Data Services Platform for Kubernetes unlocks efficiencies in your organization saving you dozens of painstaking pipeline hours per week in wait time.
