Qumulo Latest Driver Improves Storage Management of Kubernetes Apps and Workflows
Qumulo has launched an innovative driver solution to help cloud customers to better perform storage management with Kubernetes clusters.
Qumulo, a provider of data storage and management at cloud scale, is offerings customers a better way to bring storage management to Kubernetes clusters.
The Qumulo Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver makes it easier for enterprises to enable Kubernetes apps to seamlessly integrate storage creation and management as part of their workflows.
For simplicity, an administrator installs the Qumulo CSI in their Kubernetes cluster while setting up dynamic volumes, resulting in access to the Qumulo external storage for all of their containerized applications, according to the company.
A report from DataDog found that 90% of container users utilize managed cloud services, and the average number of pods in an organization has doubled over the last two years. Such use cases are expected to continue to grow. The Qumulo CSI Driver is designed for containers and DevOps needs, the company said.
In a blog post, Qumulo described the difficulty that Kubernetes can create when managing storage.
Kubernetes operates a cluster of machines, starting and stopping containers on behalf of its users. At its core, this makes figuring out how to deal with storage tricky. While they’re moving containers from machine to machine, storage typically doesn’t span machines.
For many customers, the solution to this problem is to make their data stateless, only living for the life of the container. But this is not useful for certain applications that need to share data, like many of the applications Qumulo customers rely on, including data analytics, retail operations, and software development. To solve this problem, there is a standard container storage interface (CSI) that allows the orchestrator and individual containers to connect to external (persistent) storage.
“The applications that power discovery and creation are moving from monolithic applications to cloud native microservices, built on containers and managed by Kubernetes. But those microservices need access to the same data that native applications generate and transform,” said Ben Gitenstein, Qumulo’s vice president of product.
Qumulo’s new CSI driver enables customers to store unstructured data once but serve it to an infinite number of native applications and container-based microservices - without moving data, copying it to disparate systems, or changing their workloads.
“Customers who store their data on Qumulo can now focus their time on building modern applications, not on moving or managing their data,” Gitenstein added.
Qumulo also described how its support for Kubernetes via a container storage interface (CSI) driver simplifies tasks for users. In part, it said:
Customers innovating using Kubernetes don’t have to set up a storage interface each time a cluster is set up or knocked down – the process is automatic and provides the containerized application maximum exposure to the Qumulo analytics so that customers can easily understand what’s happening across their stored data.
Qumulo’s development of a CSI driver now solves the problem of a lack of persistent storage: instead of having to set up a Qumulo instance each time a container’s life starts, Qumulo storage will automatically deploy inside the new container. This saves hours of tedious labor for the administrator while ensuring that developers won’t get storage-related pushback for wanting to innovate new uses for their containers.
This is of particular value to enterprises looking to leverage containerized infrastructures to run analytics workloads, Gitenstein noted.
For example, a retailer utilizing containers on-demand to run localized analytics against their in-store operations data can now connect those applications to their operations data on the Qumulo storage platform. This allows the customer to monitor, maintain or troubleshoot issues through the Qumulo analytics dashboard across all storage and file usage data.
For example, a retailer utilizing containers on-demand to run localized analytics against their in-store operations data can now connect those applications to their operations data on the Qumulo storage platform. This in turn allows the customer to monitor, maintain or troubleshoot issues through the Qumulo analytics dashboard across all storage and file usage data.
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