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Multi-cloud Your Way with Hitachi Integrated Container Platform and Tanzu?

By Dinesh Singh posted 10-18-2021 17:10

  
As VMworld disappears in the rear-view mirror, we have a few learnings to pick from the event. The most obvious one is that containers have made it to the mainstream. Session after session, the adoption of data made it abundantly clear that inherent portability and speed of deployments have made container technology the deployment of choice for the developer community. IT operation policies are evolving to support the new paradigm with the right infrastructure for set-up, performance, replication, recovery, and management.

We at Hitachi collaborated with VMware Product Management and engineering teams in bringing to fruition an integrated Kubernetes platform to help maximize the multi-cloud strategy for our joint customers. Although we provide flexibility in enabling our customers to build multi-cloud platforms with Red Hat OpenShift, this blog focuses on our VMware Tanzu portfolio with Kubernetes orchestration which is fast gaining in popularity.

                  
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While container deployment provides portability and flexibility, the success of the new paradigm also relies on the underlying infrastructure. The Unified Complute Platform RS, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, is trusted by businesses and federal governments to deliver a scalable, high-performance, and available backbone for modern workloads. The reference architecture for VMware Tanzu with UCP RS can be found here and a recent blog pointed out some highlights about this reference architecture. It's also worth noting that the new VSP storage models that were announced today will also form part of our VMware Tanzu integrated and aligned portfolio.

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Some of the key customer benefits with the integrated SDDC container platform are listed below-


Multi-cloud -The reference architecture outlines Kubernetes clusters that can be deployed locally or deployed with VMware Tanzu Mission Control as part of a multi-cloud container orchestration solution. Customers have the flexibility to deploy and move their containerized workloads on-premises or on any major public clouds. With the continued development and deployment of VM and container-based application inside today’s enterprise, this solution provides an ideal combination to deploy, manage and orchestrate VM and containers.


Predictability – The engineering teams from Hitachi and VMware co-designed the solution to enhance IT predictability and reduce the day-0 deployment and integration pain. The solution is tried and tested to minimize the time to the production window.


Data persistence –
Many enterprise applications require data persistence, leveraging database such as MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MySQL, among others. The container platform uses vSphere storage integrations to provide persistent storage for stateful container applications. Using vSphere storage policies in combination with VASA Provider, customers can provide dynamic ReadWriteOnce (RWO) vVols-based persistent volumes to container applications running within VMware TKG guest clusters and VMware Tanzu Supervisor clusters. Hitachi UCP RS with VMware Tanzu provides the storage infrastructure and integrations needed for your organization to successfully adopt container technology while taking advantage of an existing VMware vSphere infrastructure within your organization.


Data protection – For day 2 operations, a reliable backup and recovery are crucial for customers. VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2 includes the built-in Velero operator to enable your organization to protect any container-related entity, including Kubernetes Persistent Volumes. The management plane, VMware Tanzu Mission Control provides the capability to deploy and configure Velero to any CNCF-compliant Kubernetes clusters attached to TMC and back them up to an S3- compliant storage. Hitachi Content Platform for cloud-scale (HCP for cloud-scale) provides standard AWS compliant S3 storage that can be used with either on-premises or TMC-based Velero implementations. The combination of VCF and HCP provides a comprehensive data protection mechanism for any organization with low downtime tolerance.


Easier manageability – When IT teams are being pushed for improved productivity, very few would opt for a robust multi-cloud solution without a unified easy-to-use management tier. Infrastructure operations need to be policy-driven for efficient management at scale. Hitachi UCP Advisor provides a single pane of glass management and lifecycle management for the stack, with automation for compute, network, and storage infrastructure. Hitachi Ops Center is available with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) for storage management. VMware Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) offers a single view of disparate Kubernetes clusters across your organization. You can configure data protection, monitoring, and management of any VMware Tanzu resources or CNCF compliant Kubernetes clusters to gain a holistic view of your Kubernetes-based infrastructure throughout your organization.


Please reach out to your Hitachi representative or partner sales team to learn more about Hitachi’s integrated container platform with VMware Cloud Foundation.



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05-02-2022 02:00

Nice

04-26-2022 13:44

Very informative