Containers are critical to application modernization and digital transformation initiatives, but stateful containers pose a significant challenge for developers and IT operations teams alike. When we introduced introduced Diamanti’s bare-metal container platform in 2016, we addressed this challenge head-on with industry-leading persistent storage features, blazing NVMe flash performance, and container-granular quality-of-service (QoS).
With the release of Diamanti OS 2.0, Diamanti builds substantially on the value of its container storage architecture with the addition of enterprise-grade data protection features demanded by our Fortune 1000 customers:
Snapshots
Diamanti now enables users to instantly generate allocate-on-write snapshots, where a volume and its snapshots share data blocks until blocks in that volume are modified. This architecture offers similar storage performance as thin-provisioned volumes.
The Diamanti snapshot controller seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes to create volume snapshots that can be managed via Diamanti OS. This workflow is shown here:
Backups
With Diamanti OS 2.0, it is now possible to back up Kubernetes persistent volumes to NFS or other media. Backups are performed using snapshots and are completely schedulable and configurable per application. Backups do not impact application performance.
Diamanti Node Configuration Protection
In addition to protecting data with snapshots and backups, we’ve introduced the ability to save and restore settings for a specific Diamanti node, or for the entire cluster (this feature is currently in beta, and will be generally available in our next release).
Other Diamanti 2.0 Features and Enhancements
Expanded Storage Capacity
In parallel with the release of Diamanti OS 2.0, Diamanti adds a new D10 appliance configuration which features 8TB NVMe flash drives, for a total storage capacity of 32TB.
KVM Controller
In the 1.5 release, we delivered full support for KVM. Release 2.0 features a new CRD-based Kubernetes integration for users to manage KVM Pods running on Diamanti platform.
Endpoint-pool for StatefulSets
Each instance of a StatefulSet can have a static, predictable IP address, which is useful when exposing applications to the outside of the Kubernetes cluster. Users can define static IP addresses with Diamanti static endpoint objects following StatefulSet’s numbering convention. For example: kafka-ep-0, kafka-ep-1, kafka-ep-2, etc. Also, pods under stateful sets will be exposed via these static IP addresses.
Support for ClusterIP
With release 2.0, applications within the Diamanti cluster can now communicate with each other using ClusterIP.
Zero-Downtime Rolling Upgrade
Updates to Diamanti OS can be executed with a single-click, and are orchestrated in a non-disruptive, rolling sequence across nodes in the cluster. This feature debuts in this release as a beta feature.
There are still more major features and enhancements on our product roadmap before the end of the year. Until then, please contact the Diamanti team if you’d like us to demonstrate how we enable you to deploy your production containers in 15 minutes.
