Supercharged Kubernetes: Part 1 – Diamanti Spektra

Modern applications deserve a new infrastructure that is re-engineered from the ground up specifically catering to their highly distributed nature and scale out architecture. Kubernetes has become the common platform to deploy these modern applications however, it also has several intentional gaps that gives an organization the power to choose from a broad set of options to build their infrastructure. Given the broad choices, an organization can dedicate time and resources to assemble an infrastructure for the initial rollout, or they can accelerate their onboarding and the performance of their applications with Diamanti Spektra 2.4 – the recently announced release of the Diamanti platform.

Diamanti delivers purpose-built infrastructure for modern applications. The Diamanti platform is the first and only Kubernetes solution integrated with a patented I/O-optimized architecture, delivering transformational application performance. With Diamanti, Kubernetes becomes an out-of-the-box solution, allowing organizations to focus on deploying modern applications across on-premises and hybrid cloud infrastructure. In this three-part blog series, we will double-click on the key components of the Diamanti platform – Diamanti Spektra, Diamanti Ultima and Diamanti D20 Series that together make Diamanti the infrastructure purpose-built for modern applications. In this blog post, we will shine the spotlight on Diamanti Spektra.

Diamanti Platform Diagram
Figure 1: The Diamanti Platform

 

Diamanti Spektra is the prevalidated, pre-packaged and fully-featured software stack including Kubernetes, container runtime, operating system, enterprise-class DP/DR features, access controls and Management UI. With a production-ready Kubernetes solution up and running in 15 minutes, organizations can fast forward to confidently build and deploy their modern applications at scale.

Diamanti Spektra Software
Figure 2: Diamanti Spektra Software

 

Management Dashboard with Enterprise-Ready Security

IT administrators and users can use the Diamanti Spektra management dashboard to configure and deploy Kubernetes clusters, manage users, configure networking and storage parameters including policies for Diamanti Ultima, enable data protection and disaster recovery features as well as perform hardware and software lifecycle management. Using Diamanti Spektra, IT administrators can deploy and manage a mixed configuration of D20X and G20 platforms under a single management console.

Spektra Management Dashboard
Figure 3: Diamanti Spektra Management Dashboard

 

Kubernetes Cluster Management
Figure 4: Configuration and Management of Kubernetes Cluster

 

Diamanti Spektra is built with end-to-end enterprise-ready security. With role-based access control (RBAC), IT administrators can set up unique access control policies for each user. Users can also be authenticated through LDAP and Active Directory (AD). Support for encrypted volumes and Self-Encrypting Drives (SED) provide data security and protect against data loss with encrypted data-in-transit and data-at-rest. Diamanti Spektra can integrate with popular container security solutions offering organizations a broad range of container security vendors to choose from.

Volume Encryption
Figure 5: Enabling Volume Encryption
SED Configuration
Figure 6: Self-Encrypting Drive Configuration

 

Pre-validated and Pre-packaged Open Source Components

Diamanti Spektra includes certified Kubernetes distribution along with the CentOS operating system and container runtime. Maintainability and lifecycle management operations such as patching and updating become very easy and seamless with Kubernetes, operating system and container runtime pre-packaged, pre-validated and integrated together. With its unique and purpose-built enterprise-ready architecture for Kubernetes, Diamanti Spektra eliminates unnecessary layers of abstraction and deploys containers and virtual machines on bare metal resulting in efficient resource utilization for actual application workloads. Multi-zone clustering delivers application and data persistence in the case of failure and disaster scenarios.

Integrated Storage and Networking

During the early days of Kubernetes, Diamanti contributed the FlexVolume storage plugin which paved the path for integrating storage into Kubernetes. The FlexVolume plugin enabled stateful applications to be run on Kubernetes. FlexVolume later evolved into Container Storage Interface (CSI). Diamanti Spektra comes with an integrated CSI that supports persistent data and provides the performance required of modern applications. In addition to data persistence, Diamanti Spektra works in tandem with Diamanti Ultima and NVMe storage on Diamanti D20 series to provide data services like snapshots, multi-cluster asynchronous replication, backup and restore, and disaster recovery – all necessary for a highly available and resilient Kubernetes environment.

Storage Administration
Figure 7: Storage Administration – Configuring Multi-Cluster Asynchronous Replication

 

Diamanti Spektra integrates with Kubernetes via the standard Container Network Interface (CNI) and supports SR-IOV for high performance networking. Diamanti Spektra further leverages Diamanti Ultima to implement container granular quality of service (QoS) policies to deliver guaranteed SLAs to applications. The solution can integrate into standard enterprise data center networking topologies, delivering both overlay and non-overlay network interfaces, static and dynamic IP assignment and support for multiple interfaces per pod.

Network Administration
Figure 8: Network Administration – Managing Network Configuration

 

Diamanti Spektra – Enterprise-Ready Kubernetes Out-of-the-Box

 

Modern, distributed applications need an infrastructure that is simple to use and manage, efficient and maximizes resource utilization, and secure to deploy applications in production. Diamanti Spektra is the pre-validated, pre-packaged and fully featured software stack including Kubernetes, container runtime, operating system, enterprise-class DP/DR features, access controls and Management UI. Coupled with 24×7 enterprise support, organizations can rely on deploying their modern applications at scale while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO).

For more information about how Diamanti Spektra can help your containerized applications thrive, please Register Here and join us for the Diamanti Spektra virtual launch event.

In the next edition, we will double click on Diamanti Ultima, Diamanti’s patented technology that offloads storage and networking I/O traffic from the CPU, freeing up valuable compute and memory resources to be fully utilized by application workloads.