Offers choice of deployment configurations for containerized applications
By Irshad Raihan and Sayan Saha, Red Hat Storage
One of the key reasons software-defined storage has risen to fame over the past decade is the multiple aspects of agility it offers. As we move into the era of application-centric IT, microservices, and containers, agility isn’t just a good idea, it could mean the difference between survival and extinction.
Agility in a container-centric datacenter
As we covered in a recent webinar, Red Hat Gluster Storage offers unique value to developers and administrators looking for a storage solution that is not only container-aware but serves out storage for containerized applications natively.
One critical aspect of agility offered by Red Hat Storage is that the storage can be deployed in a number of configurations in relation to the hardware where the containers reside. This allows architects to choose the best configuration that makes the most sense for their particular situation and yet allows them to transition to a different configuration with minimal impact to applications.
Dedicated, scale-out storage for containerized applications
If you’re a storage admin looking to provide a stand-alone storage volume to applications running in containers, Red Hat Gluster Storage can expose a mount point so your applications have access to a durable, distributed storage cluster.
In this configuration, the Red Hat Gluster Storage installation runs in an independent cluster (either on premise or in one of the supported public clouds: Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform) and is accessed over the network from a platform like Red Hat OpenShift.
Red Hat OpenShift — optimized to run containerized applications and workloads — ships with the appropriate Gluster storage plugins necessary to make this configuration work out of the box.
Container-native storage: Persistent storage for containers with containers
In another deployment configuration, you can run containerized Red Hat Gluster Storage inside Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform. Red Hat Gluster Storage containers are orchestrated using Kubernetes, OpenShift’s container orchestrator like any other application container.
The storage container (Kubernetes pod) pools and serves out local or direct-attached storage from hosts (to be consumed by application containers for their persistent storage needs), offering Gluster’s rich set of enterprise-class storage features, data services, and data-protection capabilities for applications and microservices running in OpenShift.
Exactly one privileged Red Hat Gluster Storage container is instantiated per host as a Kubernetes pod. As a user, you benefit from being able to deploy enterprise-grade storage using a workflow that is consistent with their application orchestration, use a converged (compute + storage) deployment model, and can choose storage-intensive nodes (hosts with local or direct-attached storage) within a cluster for deploying storage containers, optionally collocated with application containers.
This solution, known as container-native storage, currently generally available from Red Hat, leverages an open source project named Heketi. contributed by Luis Pabón (one of the speakers on the recent webinar). Heketi is a RESTful volume manager that allows for programmatic volume allocation and provides the glue necessary to manage multiple Gluster volumes across clusters, thereby allowing Kubernetes to provision storage without being limited to a single Red Hat Gluster Storage cluster.
Heketi enhances the user experience of dynamically managing storage, whether it’s via the API or as a developer working in the OpenShift Container Platform, and runs as a container itself inside OpenShift in the container-native storage solution, providing a service endpoint for Gluster. As a storage administrator, you no longer need to manage or configure bricks, disks, or trusted storage pools. The Heketi service will manage all hardware for you, enabling it to allocate storage on demand. Any disks registered with Heketi must be provided in raw format, which will then be managed by it using LVM on the disks provided.
This is a key differentiator for Red hat Gluster Storage. As far as we can tell, no other storage vendor can provide this flavor of container-native storage, and certainly not with the level of integration provided with OpenShift Container Platform. As a number of early adopters have told us, it’s invaluable to have a single point of support all the way up from the operating system layer, to orchestration, app dev, and storage.
Stay tuned — 'cause we're not done
We're working hard to continue to innovate to make a much more seamless experience for developers and administrators alike to manage storage in a containerized environment.
We’ve delivered a number of industry-first innovations over the past year and will continue to focus on enabling a seamless user experience for developers and administrators looking to adopt containers as the preferred deployment platform. Stay tuned.
À propos de l'auteur
Parcourir par canal
Automatisation
Les dernières actualités en matière de plateforme d'automatisation qui couvre la technologie, les équipes et les environnements
Intelligence artificielle
Actualité sur les plateformes qui permettent aux clients d'exécuter des charges de travail d'IA sur tout type d'environnement
Services cloud
En savoir plus sur notre gamme de services cloud gérés
Sécurité
Les dernières actualités sur la façon dont nous réduisons les risques dans tous les environnements et technologies
Edge computing
Actualité sur les plateformes qui simplifient les opérations en périphérie
Infrastructure
Les dernières nouveautés sur la plateforme Linux d'entreprise leader au monde
Applications
À l’intérieur de nos solutions aux défis d’application les plus difficiles
Programmes originaux
Histoires passionnantes de créateurs et de leaders de technologies d'entreprise
Produits
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Red Hat OpenShift
- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
- Services cloud
- Voir tous les produits
Outils
- Formation et certification
- Mon compte
- Ressources développeurs
- Assistance client
- Calculateur de valeur Red Hat
- Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog
- Rechercher un partenaire
Essayer, acheter et vendre
Communication
- Contacter le service commercial
- Contactez notre service clientèle
- Contacter le service de formation
- Réseaux sociaux
À propos de Red Hat
Premier éditeur mondial de solutions Open Source pour les entreprises, nous fournissons des technologies Linux, cloud, de conteneurs et Kubernetes. Nous proposons des solutions stables qui aident les entreprises à jongler avec les divers environnements et plateformes, du cœur du datacenter à la périphérie du réseau.
Sélectionner une langue
Red Hat legal and privacy links
- À propos de Red Hat
- Carrières
- Événements
- Bureaux
- Contacter Red Hat
- Lire le blog Red Hat
- Diversité, équité et inclusion
- Cool Stuff Store
- Red Hat Summit