Partner POV | Enterprise Storage, Resiliency, and Disaster Recovery for Kubernetes

Article written by Ryan Behiel, Senior Principal Technical Marketing, SDS and Appliances, Veritas. 

Are you running applications in containers? Are you considering using containers to run new IT services? As more business-critical applications are moving towards a containerized deployment model backed by Kubernetes, one of the challenges you are likely facing is finding a proven way to provide the enterprise storage, resiliency, and disaster recovery functionality that business-critical applications need.

Veritas InfoScale for Kubernetes delivers all this functionality and more, enabling you to confidently run your enterprise applications in Kubernetes with the foundation they need to deliver the smooth and predictable experience your end users expect.

Container-native Storage and Resiliency

InfoScale for Kubernetes is a software-defined container-native solution that offers both a quick and easy deployment experience and a simple operational experience that can be managed using native Kubernetes functions and integrations. This reduces complexity while enabling you to confidently run and manage your applications in Kubernetes with the enterprise foundation that business-critical applications need to be fully production ready.

One of the main features InfoScale for Kubernetes provides is parallel access high performance persistent storage that can be provisioned with either traditional SAN, or using the storage directly attached to the cluster nodes with a feature called Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS). FSS is designed to deliver block storage that can provide better performance and reliability than NFS while giving you the flexibility to use any type of underlying storage infrastructure. InfoScale for Kubernetes also manages data integrity and reduces unplanned downtime with integrated I/O fencing that ensures pods are both moved and quickly brought online in the event of an infrastructure failure within the cluster.

InfoScale for Kubernetes supports all storage access modes and provides several classes of storage by default (performance, resilience, encrypted), making it an ideal foundation for a wide variety of applications with several key benefits:

• Simplicity – InfoScale for Kubernetes runs as an application within Kubernetes, making it easy to use and manage.
•  Functionality – InfoScale delivers parallel access shared storage for Kubernetes with several advanced features that can help reduce your costs.
• Resiliency – easily implement full and comprehensive software-defined DR capability for Kubernetes clusters with a near-zero RPO and RTO.

Figure 1 is an example of how InfoScale for Kubernetes can help optimize operations and provide container-native advanced storage management for a complex multi-tier business application.

Figure 1. Microservice-based business application deployed using InfoScale for Kubernetes enterprise storage.

Extending Kubernetes with Enterprise Functionality

Kubernetes provides excellent configuration management and operational orchestration for containers, but it relies on third party integrations for the data management functionality that many business-critical applications need to be production ready. InfoScale extends Kubernetes and ensures that your containerized applications have a proven enterprise foundation – with storage, resiliency, and disaster recovery – to optimize operations and avoid unplanned downtime.

InfoScale for Kubernetes provides important functionality for business-critical applications:

•  High performance storage that can provide better performance and reliability than NFS-based storage while optimizing infrastructure costs.
•  Disaster recovery for Kubernetes that can deliver a near-zero RPO and RTO and can be configured with namespace granularly to protect Kubernetes resources, multi-tier applications and entire Kubernetes clusters from site-level failures and outages.

Efficient service management and operational visibility is also key to ensuring that your applications are production ready. Understanding how your applications are performing relies on having real-time data and visibility into various system metrics that help you understand the state of your IT services. InfoScale for Kubernetes includes an observability plug-in that provides key storage and system metrics to Prometheus where you can configure real-time monitoring and alerting. From here, the InfoScale for Kubernetes metrics are accessible to corporate ITSM, observability, analysis and workflow management tools that can automate the process of managing service tickets and delivering operational intelligence.

With enterprise storage, resiliency and disaster recovery for Kubernetes, Veritas InfoScale is a software-defined, flexible, enterprise-grade foundation that extends Kubernetes to ensure your business-critical applications are performant and resilient.