As organizations move from evaluating containers and modernizing stateless application, the move to modernizing production critical applications brings new challenges. Especially to modernizing stateful applications. Production stateful applications brings storage challenges including; backup, availability, DR, monitoring, and mobility to leverage the new found portability of containers. These challenges must also be addressed in the proper tools used by Dev team and Ops team to maximize efficiency. While Hitachi offers compute platforms from UCP to host stateless and stateful containers, Hitachi provides several key storage integrations to address production challenges. Challenges that ultimately limit containerization efforts and impede the journey to modernization.
Hitachi has been one of early adopters of Kubernetes CSI to integrate Hitachi VSP storage into Kubernetes. Hitachi Storage Plug-in for Containers (HSPC) provides developers to dynamically provision persistent volumes for their stateful applications such as databases. Eliminating the burden on the operations teams provision traditional volumes or LUNs. HSPC also provides CSI capabilities such as crash consistent snapshot for local data protection but as well as cloning volumes. Other capabilities include volumes expansion for easily scale capacity needs as needed.
As containerized workloads becomes more critical for a line of business, the storage reliability and availability requirements will also become more stringent. Containerized application’s mobility also gets impacted due to persistent volume requirements. Hitachi Replication Plug-in for Containers (HRPC) connects to remote Kubernetes clusters in remote locations to provide disaster recovery, volume migration, and remote backup. This provides the developers to self-provision a replicated persistent volume through Kubernetes APIs and tools. It also eliminate the need for operations team to provision replicated volumes in the traditional IT methods.
Production Kubernetes also needs monitoring capabilities to achieve observability. During times of performance degradation developers and operations needs to have the data properly troubleshoot the application down to the underlying infrastructure. Hitachi Storage Plug-in for Prometheus (HSPP) provides VSP storage telemetry information into Prometheus along with dashboards in Grafana. Placing the infrastructure storage telemetry data in a central location where data from other Kubernetes services and containerized application can also be monitored.
Hitachi's storage integrations with Red Hat Openshift and Kubernetes, addresses key challenges to provide storage for production deployments operating in a DevOps environment.
- HSPC - Dynamic provisioning of persistent volumes. Including lifecycle capabilities including snapshots, cloning, and volume expansion.
- HRPC - Data protection, disaster recovery, and migration of persistent volume to remote Kubernetes cluster.
- HSPP - Storage monitoring into Prometheus and central dashboard in Grafana to enable observability.
For technical deep dive on Hitachi Replication Plug-in for Containers see
Persistent Volume Replication Data Services for Kubernetes.
For technical deep drive on Hitachi Storage Plug-in for Prometheus see
Monitoring Kubernetes Resources and Hitachi storage with Hitachi Storage Plug-in for Prometheus.Keep in mind these integrations can be had even with Kubernetes or Red Hat Openshift being deployed in vSphere like in UCP CI for VMware. When Kubernetes or Red Hat Openshift is deployed in vSphere, storage can be integrated into the VMware's storage stack through the use of VMware's CNS CSI with our VASA provider.