Why persistent storage?
As customers move to deliver new revenue-generating services to their end customers, we see IT development teams move aggressively to cloud-native techniques, including containers as the form factor to provide these application services. These containerized application services are hosted on Kubernetes clusters, that run across private, hybrid and service provider clouds. As with any application service, data eventually needs to be persisted and stored reliably. This could be a customer’s grocery order placed from a mobile app or a data stream from a drone service that AI/ML models are analyzing. The data location could be a SQL/NoSQL database, temporary file system using volumes from internal storage on a server or a reliable storage system such as Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). As adoption grows for containers and the supporting ecosystem, including software to manage Kubernetes clusters and a range of data storage options, Cisco and Hitachi have collaborated to provide additional choices.
Cisco now enables customers to deploy turnkey production-grade Kubernetes clusters directly from the Cisco Intersight dashboard under their Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service (IKS) for virtualized VMware environments. Hitachi collaborated with Cisco to enable IKS to run on Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions, a software integrated storage solution with Hitachi VSP and Cisco Unified Compute System (UCS). Hitachi offers IKS customers a solution with two flexible options that can be used concurrently to meet the majority of deployment configurations of IKS that require persistent storage services for apps running in those Kubernetes Clusters. The solution integrates Hitachi Storage Plug-in for Containers (HSPC) and VMware CSI with Cloud Native Storage (CNS) using Hitachi Storage Provider for VMware vCenter (VASA) software.