Today we’re excited to announce the release of Diamanti Ultima, a new standalone software product based on Diamanti’s industry-leading Kubernetes data plane management solution. Enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud-native and hybrid cloud strategies and need a modern data plane solution that can align with these initiatives. Diamanti Ultima delivers cloud-native data services with the only integrated networking and storage data plane solution that can extend across on-premises and cloud-based environments, supporting any Kubernetes cluster distribution.

The growth of stateful applications and general maturity of Kubernetes is driving many enterprises to consider how data is managed over the lifecycle of an application. Diamanti Ultima offers technology decision-makers a simpler and more robust option over traditional and other cloud-native storage solutions for Kubernetes across on-premises and public cloud environments. In this blog post, we’ll discuss why.

Diamanti Ultima vs. Traditional Storage Solutions

Deploying stateful applications on Kubernetes has become commonplace, making enterprises recognize the need for powerful cloud-native storage solutions that are container-aware and can scale along with the workload. As these applications scale, they demand the underlying storage solution to scale proportionately with multiple smaller volumes. But traditional storage solutions do not have visibility into containers and Pods and applies the same approach to both legacy VM-based and containerized applications by offering a fewer number of large volumes. This leads to many containerized applications being tied to a single large volume eventually creating significant performance bottlenecks.

Additionally, traditional storage solutions cannot tell the difference between different pods running on the same node, meaning that I/O bandwidth is divided evenly amongst workloads, or worse—noisy neighbors can hog all the available bandwidth. With intelligence and insight into Kubernetes, Diamanti Ultima can be tuned to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) for both networking and storage traffic at a container-granular level.

Diamanti Ultima is a purpose-built and fully integrated data plane for Kubernetes that seamlessly scales as per the workload demands without compromising on the performance. It provides container-aware data services for the protection and resiliency of applications, including instant volume snapshots, off-cluster backup and restore, asynchronous replication for cross-cluster disaster recovery and synchronous volume mirroring within clusters, even those spanning availability zones. This enables enterprises to have greater control and flexibility to deploy and manage any application across on-premises and cloud (AWS) environments.

Diamanti Ultima vs. Other Cloud-Native Storage Solutions

Other cloud-native storage solutions in the market such as Portworx have also addressed these storage and data services challenges for containerized applications. But they fail to offer an important component of the Kubernetes stack – networking. Portworx does not provide any networking capability and heavily relies on third-party Container Network Interface (CNI) plugins, which come with their own set of drawbacks and challenges. System administrators need to spend significant time and effort understanding their network topology, security, latency and throughput requirements when selecting a networking solution. This DIY approach comes with the problem of selecting and managing many different moving pieces together and dealing with multiple vendors.

Diamanti Ultima replaces multiple point solutions to deliver multi-cluster networking and storage management and works with a wide range of underlying infrastructure. It comes with an advanced CNI plugin that seamlessly integrates with customer’s existing data center networks and includes multi-tenant Layer 2 and overlay container networking capabilities, providing a simple and consistent operating experience for container lifecycle management across a hybrid cloud.

For on-premises environments, Diamanti Ultima offers patented I/O acceleration technology that significantly improves the performance of data-intensive applications. Diamanti Ultima offload is a pair of second-generation PCIe based I/O acceleration cards that help avoid overprovisioning of resources by eliminating “noisy neighbors” and assures guaranteed performance with hardware-enforced QoS for storage and networking.

Diamanti Ultima vs. Cloud-Based Storage Services

Like traditional storage solutions, cloud storage is also designed to support only VM-based legacy applications and not containerized applications. Leveraging these cloud storage solutions for Kubernetes deployments results in performance inefficiencies, overprovisioning of storage, vendor lock-in and increased costs. Furthermore, cloud providers charge additionally for backup, data protection, disaster recovery, and multi-zone availability capabilities. For I/O-intensive applications, public cloud providers require customers to pay for “provisioned IOPS” to guarantee performance that easily pushes IT teams and budgets over the edge.

Diamanti Ultima is Kubernetes data plane software for both on-premises and public cloud environments. It provides interoperability with various public clouds and virtual and bare-metal infrastructure, abstracting the underlying storage system (e.g. Amazon EBS or NVMe), and supporting various Kubernetes management solutions including Diamanti Spektra, Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon EKS, and other Kubernetes services. Ultima’s hybrid cloud data portability empowers enterprises to migrate and failover stateful applications between clusters while maintaining persistent data, avoiding vendor lock-in and lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO).

A Turnkey Data Plane Solution for Containerized Applications

Diamanti has played a huge role in shaping the intersection of containers and storage by contributing “FlexVolume” in its early days to now launching the industry’s first completely integrated networking and storage data plane solution that can extend across on-premises and cloud-based environments. Diamanti Ultima empowers enterprises to “break from legacy architectures” and solves the challenge of container-based hybrid clouds with a simple, cost-effective solution for managing Kubernetes at any scale.

To learn more:

• Read our Press Release
• See the benchmark testing results for Splunk Enterprise on the Diamanti platform against AWS
• Watch this CNCF webinar about Data Services for Cloud-Native Workloads