30 Mar 5 Benefits of Kubernetes-Native Storage for the Enterprise
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 (K8s) has revolutionized IT by providing the ability for enterprises to deploy a common cloud platform for their business applications across multiple clouds, delivering agility, consistency, and reductions in costs and complexity. All of this interaction can be well managed by container native storage (CNS). CNS is a Kubernetes-native, software-defined, storage solution that itself runs in a container on each node of a Kubernetes cluster.
In this article, we’re highlighting the top 5 benefits of Kubernetes Native Storage for enterprises but first, here’s a brief overview of how Kubernetes works: Kubernetes is a container orchestrator that helps make sure each container is where it’s supposed to be when it’s supposed to be there and ensures that the containers work in sync with one another. K8s is designed to kill and/or restart any container in the data infrastructure at will. When a container is killed, its data is lost. Using a CNS ensures data persists even if the container doesn’t. Any stateful app that requires data to persist (transaction apps, for example) requires a CNS like ionir Kubernetes Native Storage. Essentially, Kubernetes automates container operations, eliminating difficult and time-consuming manual processes that correspond with application development and scaling.
So, now that you know a bit more about how Kubernetes works, let’s dive into the major benefits of moving to and managing K8s with a robust CNS for enterprises.
1. One IT Platform Spanning All Types of Cloud Infrastructure
Amidst a global pandemic, where many employees are working remotely or in a hybrid work situation, the use of cloud-based storage for enterprises is no longer a “nice-to-have” it’s a necessity. With Kubernetes, apps run wherever makes the most sense and moving them only takes a few seconds. Kubernetes plays a major role in the communication and data management of public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructures. ionir Kubernetes Native Storage (K8NS) — a single platform that is simple, inexpensive, and quickly moves your data around multiple clouds whether private, public, or hybrid — improves operational cost, utilization, and portability.
Within the context of an enterprise, the ionir platform deployed in both the public and private clouds enables a consistent IT environment with a common set of management workflows reducing overall IT costs and complexity, all the while increasing flexibility in provisioning and deployment of resources.
2. Kubernetes Native Storage Eliminates Data Gravity
Kubernetes adoption is escalating fast, but one barrier remains: data cannot be moved quickly. Unlike apps, transporting data takes hours or days which is costly and wastes valuable company and employee time that could be better spent engaged in value-adding tasks. Data Gravity threatens the entire K8s value proposition. Here at ionir, and similar to other CNS solutions, our software pools local physical media capacity and presents virtual volumes to applications. Unlike other CNS, ionir K8NS eliminates data gravity by enabling instant movement of data to and from any cluster anywhere and instant access to any point in time.
With ionir, application data is enabled to move at the speed of applications. Full volumes, regardless of size or amount of data, are transported across clouds or across the world in 40 seconds or less providing a positive shift in data agility. By achieving the vision of K8s at enterprise scale, IT Teams are empowered to make decisions faster, innovate quicker, and operate more effectively.
3. Unified Data and Storage Management with Kubernetes
Enterprises need to have one single method to store and manage their data, making each piece of data easy to locate, restore, and replicate. According to our research, by 2022, enterprises will modernize over 50% of their existing applications to cloud-native services. There’s a growing demand for enterprises to digitize their infrastructure to keep up with their competitors and maximize the efficiency and growth of the business as a whole. Kubernetes Native Storage allows enterprises to more effectively manage their growing data storage in a simple and inexpensive way.
What’s worse than accidentally deleting an important piece of data? Not being able to locate and restore it. ionir better protects data by providing IT professionals with the ability to instantly restore data to any point in time with 1-second RPO across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. ionir K8NS eliminates the need for complex, time-consuming snapshots. On-the-fly deduplication and AI-driven tiering ensure data is efficiently stored on the most appropriate media for each application based on performance, density, cost, location, and other key factors.
4. Achieve Scalability, Faster and More Securely
Enterprises can’t afford to stop their growth due to data storage limitations. K8s provides a way to scale containers to a desired state and manage their life cycles as it automatically monitors and maintains container health. Kubernetes Native Storage accelerates app delivery and instantly moves data from development to production with instant scaling and movement between clouds. This ensures instant movement of data to the edge for scale and availability, and from the edge for analysis. ionir enables IT staff to distribute to and protect edge, (re)install golden images, and consolidate edge to core. By teleporting clones, IT teams can instantly scale CI across multiple worker nodes.
With Kubernetes, ionir defines complex containerized applications and deploys them across a cluster of servers or even multiple clusters with near infinite capacity and performance. With Kubernetes Native Storage, your workloads scale with your business as it grows.
5. Enterprise Storage Without Enterprise Complexity
Kubernetes has become very popular among enterprises since its inception in 2014 due to its ability to automate complex application processes. However, it can be challenging to implement — especially for non-developers — and requires extensive knowledge and training. Because of the intricate skills required to effectively implement Kubernetes into the enterprise, it may be a good idea to hire a team of experts equipped with the proper tools to help you digitally transform your business.
Kubernetes Native Storage runs alongside application containers while ionir’s microservices architecture ensures resiliency and seamless extensibility. This software-defined storage solution instantly adapts to the workload and offers enterprise-grade capabilities previously available only on traditional, expensive, monolithic storage appliances. With its simplicity at scale, ionir K8NS can reduce infrastructure and operational costs by over 40%. Enterprises can instantly access data at any point in time, clone, and copy with a single click.
Final Thoughts
To be competitive in 2021, enterprises need to become agile with moving and storing their data. ionir is a next generation approach to container native storage. Only ionir offers instant data mobility and restoration to any point in time. Previous generation CNS offerings struggle with data gravity and still require complex backup, snapshot, and restoration. ionir is the right storage service choice for any Kubernetes environment where persistent storage and enterprise-class data management are required.
Dare to make a radical business improvement with ionir Kubernetes Native Storage — Get in touch with us today.
