The latest version of NetApp® Astra™ Control 23.07 and Astra Trident 23.07:
Astra Control is an application-aware data management solution that protects, recovers, and moves data-rich Kubernetes workloads in public clouds and on premises. It enables data protection, disaster recovery, and migration for Kubernetes workloads by leveraging NetApp’s industry-leading data management technology for Snapshot™ copies, backups, replication, and cloning.
Many NetApp customers use MetroCluster configurations to achieve their business continuity goals in their data centers. These configurations protect against data center failures with automatic failover for many workloads, including Kubernetes clusters with a zero RPO and near-zero RTO.
Kubernetes clusters in MetroCluster configurations are usually "stretched" between data centers manually or on top of an existing vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) configuration. NetApp MetroCluster provides synchronously replicated datastores to vMSC and persistent storage through Astra Trident to the stretched Kubernetes cluster, as shown in the following figure.
Although MetroCluster is an excellent business continuity solution for Kubernetes, customers still need protection against other failures like accidental or malicious data corruption, deletion, bugs, or ransomware. This release of Astra Control addresses these requirements. Additionally, Astra Control Center can be deployed in a Kubernetes cluster using MetroCluster for persistent storage. Switchover and switchback operations are completely transparent and don't affect Astra’s normal Snapshot, backup, clone, and restore operations.
With this release, customers can migrate data across ONTAP clusters without needing to move their application/namespace to another K8s cluster. Customers can replicate their persistent volumes with SnapMirror across ONTAP backends using a second storage class pointing to the second ONTAP instance. Consequently, customers can now use Astra to migrate data quickly and easily, as their storage reaches capacity or for other business reasons.
Longhorn is a lightweight, reliable, and easy-to-use distributed block storage provider for Kubernetes.
It is free and open-source software. Originally developed by Rancher Labs, it is now being developed as an incubating project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
This release of Astra Control qualifies and supports Longhorn as a storage provider.
Astra Control can provide Snapshot copies, backups, restores, and clones to Kubernetes workloads using Longhorn as a persistent storage provider.
Trident upgrade optimization provides higher availability. Trident can now upgrade the Trident DaemonSet pod that runs on Kubernetes worker nodes individually. In previous Trident versions, it was necessary to wait for all instances of the Trident DaemonSet pod to terminate before deploying the new version of the pod. With this enhancement, Trident can upgrade Trident DaemonSet pods with minimal downtime, even if a pod on a single Kubernetes worker node fails to terminate.
Snapshot import allows users to make K8s and Trident aware of storage Snapshot copies that were taken out of band, either manually in an element manager such as ONTAP System Manager or automatically via a Snapshot policy (which Trident supports).
Snapshot import also supports cross-cluster migration use cases, so that a Snapshot taken by K8s/Trident on one cluster may be imported (unmanaged) to a different cluster, where it may be used to clone volumes for independent use on that destination cluster.
Scaling improvements in Astra Trident now enables the Trident controller to communicate more rapidly with the Kubernetes API resulting in significantly faster registration of Trident node pods with the Trident controller pod. Additionally, consumers of the Trident controller API will be given a Retry-After header, preventing superfluous retries that would otherwise exacerbate the issue.
Astra Control also offers these enhancements as part of this release.
This Astra Control update delivers exciting new app data management functionality and addresses many customer pain points associated with Kubernetes data protection. Free trials are available for Astra Control. Sign up for a free trial to get started today.
Sayan Saha is a product executive with open-source software product management experience spanning Linux-based platform software, containers, Kubernetes, high-availability/clustering software, virtualization, hyper-converged systems, and software-defined storage. At NetApp, he runs product management for Astra—a fully managed (SaaS) multihybrid cloud data management platform for Kubernetes applications. Before NetApp, he was a product management leader at AWS and Red Hat, where he led cloud file storage, distributed storage, and Kubernetes storage products.