The Challenges of Persistent Storage for Containers
Containerization brings unprecedented portability, ease and efficiency for rapidly deploying and updating new microservices and existing applications. At the same time, the lightweight packaging and delivery technology introduces several challenges when sharing and protecting data at scale:
- Adequate safeguards to ensure uninterrupted data access despite the ephemeral nature of containers.
- Rapid recovery of data, files, and applications following unintentional or malicious data loss, deletion, or corruption.
- Intuitive means of provisioning storage from your container orchestration platform with the appropriate quality of service.
- Means of deleting storage and reclaiming the space when no longer needed to ensure that the container host can provision capacity for new requests without failure.
Solution: Bring the Performance and Agility of Software-Defined Storage to Your Containerized Applications and Microservices
DataCore offers DevOps and IT operations managers a rich storage control plane of software-defined storage services spanning container hosts, virtualized machines, and bare metal servers—whether on-premises or in the cloud. The advanced, yet cost-effective solution provides fast, continuous access to shared persistent storage, along with rapid recovery of databases, containerized application files, and microservice images. These essential elements prove invaluable for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) projects demanding dependable and predictable behavior.
Two plugins integrate with container orchestration platforms to enable dynamic provisioning of persistent storage volumes with enhanced properties.
- The DataCore™ CSI plugin adheres to the Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) v1.0.0 specification. Get it on GitHub »
- The DataCore™ SDS Docker Volume Plugin is a Docker-certified plugin that implements the Docker Volume Plugin specification. Get it on Docker Hub »
Both plugins provide several advanced data protection and data recovery options for dependable, predictable behavior at scale.
Moreover, you can rewind volumes back in time, like a DVR, through DataCore’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature. In addition to CDP, the combination of DataCore’s in-memory caching and auto-tiering of highly available persistent storage pools ensure low-latency, non-stop access for maximum productivity at the lowest cost.
Multipath iSCSI and Fibre Channel connections to the volumes are supported to prevent single points of failure.
The Kubernetes and Docker plugins are available as no-charge options for SANsymphony™ and DataCore™ Hyperconverged Virtual SAN customers under current support contract.
Example Volume Configurations
docker volume create -d datacore --name test-vol1 -o size=5GB
Simple Volume Creation: Create a persistent volume named test-vol1 with size 5GB
docker volume create -d datacore --name new-vol -o fromSnap=snapshot-name
Create a volume based on an already existing snapshot of a persistent volume
docker volume create -d datacore --name some-time-ago -o rollback=existing-data -o rollbacktime=300
Create a volume based on a point in time from an already existing volume. In this example, a new persistent volume will be created based on the data that was present 300 seconds ago in the volume named existing-data.
We’re All Connected: Key Containerization Technology Partners
DataCore collaborates with Docker and Kubernetes to provide persistent block storage for your containerized environment, radically improving application performance and scalability as well as the speed of deployment.
These highly concurrent I/O processes are specially well suited to optimizations from DataCore™ Parallel I/O technology.
