Co-authored by Ishwari Lokare & Shilpa Mayanna 

Last week we announced GA of Diamanti D20 RH for Red Hat OpenShift 4.5 which helps enterprises break from legacy architectures to deliver transformational application performance, scalability, and operational efficiency for OpenShift. Our certified solution brings in the best of both worlds – Red Hat OpenShift 4.5’s valuable development features along with Diamanti’s industry-leading cloud-native data plane solution and I/O-optimized storage and networking architecture. This blog is a walk-through of Diamanti D20 RH’s storage capabilities which plays a critical role when deploying and managing business-critical stateful applications on Red Hat OpenShift.

Challenges with Containerizing Mission-Critical Stateful Applications

Today enterprises are looking to extend container advantages such as speed, simplicity, and portability to stateful applications. According to 451 Research, 55% of enterprise users say that stateful applications make up more than half of their containerized applications.

However, deploying and managing containerized stateful applications in production requires a different operational paradigm that even the best of orchestration platforms cannot provide. Mission-critical stateful applications such as databases and other big data applications have more demanding requirements for security, reliability and availability. Many of these complex stateful applications being deployed to OpenShift are also I/O intensive. This puts immense pressure on the underlying infrastructure specifically from the storage perspective to deliver on these performance and availability requirements.

Diamanti D20 RH provides an industry-leading cloud-native data plane solution that enables platform architects, IT operations, and application owners to take advantage of the performance and enterprise-class features they need to run containerized applications in production at scale, complete with data protection and business continuity features built-in.

Enterprise-grade Diamanti D20 RH Storage Features

Diamanti D20 RH offers data protection, backup and restore, disaster recovery, and built-in high availability providing a resilient and powerful platform for containerized applications – including database workloads. Diamanti supports the following enterprise-level data services.

Volume Mirroring

Diamanti’s storage architecture allows volumes to be created with multiple mirrors to ensure the high availability of data. This provides protection against any data loss in the case of a node or a drive failure. These mirrors are spread across different nodes in the cluster. Any write to these volumes is synchronously written to all mirrors. If a node hosting the stateful application fails, an application can failover to another node without any data loss and with minimum downtime.

Storage Snapshot

A snapshot represents a point-in-time copy of data. The Diamanti platform supports instant snapshot creation of a volume with zero-copy. Snapshots provide protection against any accidental data loss. They reside on the node where the volume exists and are space-optimized as snapshots share blocks with their volume. Local snapshots can be used to restore the volume instantly to a specific point in time. Snapshots on the Diamanti platform are also used for backup and replication for consistency.

Backup and Restore

Diamanti platform offers a data protection solution that can backup all application volumes to remote backup targets. The backup targets can be NFS, iSCSI or cloud object storage.

Initiating a backup for a volume doesn’t have any impact on the application’s performance or its availability. Diamanti’s backup controller, integrated with Kubernetes, allows users to configure policies such as frequency for running the backup, retention period for the backups and enabling compression. These backups ensure that application data is available for restore in case of any disaster.

Replication for Disaster Recovery

Diamanti D20 RH provides a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution using volume replication across multiple clusters. Volume replication periodically sends the volume data to remote clusters to protect against primary site failure. The clusters can be deployed in multiple regions for fault isolation. Since these clusters are separated by long distances, synchronous replication becomes challenging. Hence, volumes across multiple clusters are asynchronously replicated. In case of a disaster, the application can be instantly started with the replicated volume using the NVMe SSDs on Diamanti D20 RH.

Guaranteed Performance with Diamanti Ultima Offload

Diamanti Ultima offload is a pair of second-generation PCIe based I/O acceleration cards that offload networking and storage traffic, freeing up compute resources to power modern applications. Diamanti Ultima storage and network offload capabilities integrate with OpenShift Container Platform via the standard Container Storage Interface (CNI) and Container Network Interface (CNI) plug-ins respectively.

Diamanti Ultima offload delivers 10x to 30x performance improvement with sub-100 microsecond latency and 1 million IOPS per node for I/O-intensive applications. The unique aspect of Diamanti Ultima is the policy-based quality of service (QoS) feature with which an application is assured a specific level of storage IOPS and network throughput at all times. This enables an application to operate at consistent performance and latency regardless of the number, type or size of other applications operating on the same node.

Conclusion

Diamanti D20 RH enables enterprises to meet their requirements around backup, high availability and disaster recovery, protecting both applications and their data. Diamanti D20 RH’s optimized storage architecture combined with the power of Diamanti Ultima offload cards helps consistently deliver extremely high application performance at low latency.

Look out for our next blog where we will highlight the benefits of Diamanti D20 RH’s unique networking capabilities.

To learn more about how Diamanti D20 RH can accelerate the return on your OpenShift investment:

• Join us for a webinar on October 27
• Read our Press Release
• Read Diamanti D20 RH Datasheet