Supercharge Your Applications for Better Performance, Lower TCO

By Diamanti

When leading global enterprises like Intesa Sanpaolo build their modernization strategies, they are considering the long-term benefits of the transition to microservices architecture and DevOps workflows with containers and Kubernetes. Beyond experiments and building the first or second greenfield applications with containers, these organizations recognize that the technology shift has a much broader scope and impact. In an IT landscape where a majority of applications will be running on Kubernetes, performance and TCO are critical; Diamanti has the leading solution to address these issues. 

The Growth of High-Value, Stateful Applications in Kubernetes

The earliest adopters of containers and microservices primarily focused on lightweight, stateless applications. This was partially due to the immaturity of the ecosystem around containers for handling state and but also to the nature of the types of applications getting containerized first. Regardless, the benefits of containers were abundantly clear:

  • Rapid software development cycles
  • Reduced incompatibility issues between Development and Production
  • Greater collaboration and transparency between Development and Operations
  • Easier patching and updating software

IT organizations took notice and naturally wanted to extend these benefits to all kinds of applications. Around the same time, the ecosystem also started to plug in more solutions to enable traditional and persistent storage for stateful applications. When Kubernetes established itself as the orchestration platform of choice, Diamanti contributed the FlexVolume storage plugin which later evolved into the Container Storage Interface (CSI). 

Today, Persistent Volumes are a built-in object in Kubernetes, and organizations are rapidly moving high-value, stateful, core business applications to Kubernetes, including:

  • Databases: Containerized databases allow developers to rapidly prototype applications. These can be both relational databases (RDBMS) like PostgreSQL and MariaDB or non-relational databases like MongoDB. Databases are an important part of a vast majority of applications and are also one of the most common types of applications that get containerized, after app development pipelines and web services. 
  • Data Processing: Most enterprises now rely on data analytics and processing tools like Splunk and Elasticsearch to rapidly process petabytes of information. This includes everything from infrastructure logs, application monitoring, and security incident and event management (SIEM). Data streaming tools like Apache Kafka are also being rapidly adopted for these purposes.
  • Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML): Companies in every industry are discovering new ways to use AI/ML to improve their businesses. From back office operational improvements to customer-facing predictive analytics, AI/ML investment and adoption is one of the most exciting technology breakthroughs of the last 5 years. With Kubeflow 1.0 now available, the industry is standardizing on this methodology for the full life cycle of an ML model in Kubernetes. 

These applications have a few obvious things in common: They are all data-intensive and performance-driven applications. 

Performance Matters

The enterprises that are leading the adoption of DevOps and microservices in their organizations are also the ones who are extending containers and Kubernetes to their high-value applications. However, these applications demand much greater I/O than standard applications and are more sensitive to latency variations. As a result, IT organizations are seeing some challenges around running these applications on traditional infrastructure – either in the cloud or on-premises. 

The Diamanti platform is purpose-built specifically for these applications. The founders of Diamanti accurately predicted that Kubernetes would revolutionize enterprise applications and put increasing pressure on I/O performance. They created patented technology to accelerate storage and networking I/O in PCIe offload cards while delivering a bare-metal Kubernetes platform for consistent low latency. Combining this technology and high-performance hyperconverged hardware with NVMe storage plus a certified Kubernetes stack in an all-in-one hardware and software solution delivers transformational application performance. Diamanti customers usually see 10x to 30x performance improvements over traditional infrastructure and public clouds. 

The Impact on Cost

The performance improvements directly translate into TCO savings as our customers are able to drive greater efficiencies and reduce their overall footprint and operational costs: 

  • By moving from 16 servers to just 2 Diamanti nodes, one of our banking customers was able to reduce their software licenses and operational costs while getting better results with their Elasticsearch implementation.
  • By moving their platform from a public cloud to Diamanti, another banking customer was able to double the performance of their MariaDB application while reducing their 3 year TCO by 80%

These are just a few of the examples of how Diamanti can help you supercharge your applications while saving you millions. Over the next few weeks, we will be diving into these high-value applications, sharing more about how we’re helping customers improve performance and reduce their costs. Check back here for more great articles and details about the savings we’re generating for some leading enterprises.

 

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