Enabling NetApp as the best storage for Kubernetes

We are thrilled to announce that NetApp® Trident™ 24.10 software is now generally available! This release underscores our commitment to making NetApp the best storage solution for Kubernetes applications in the enterprise, providing comprehensive data management and protection features for both on-premises and cloud environments.  

With this announcement, Trident now offers all the core capabilities that previously required the NetApp Astra™ product. These new Trident capabilities are now delivered as Kubernetes native services at no extra cost. This strategic shift makes it even easier for our global customer base to adopt and to exploit these capabilities in a simple, cost-effective manner, and it increases the success of their Kubernetes workloads.   

NetApp Trident is known for its robust ability to automatically provision industry-leading NetApp storage, enabling your Kubernetes workloads to benefit from the scale, performance, availability, and advanced data protection features of NetApp ONTAP® technology. Whether you’re operating in a hybrid multicloud environment or strictly on premises, Trident simplifies the provisioning and protection of your Kubernetes applications. And as an open-source solution, Trident is available at no cost to customers. You get automatic provisioning that enables your NetApp ONTAP storage systems to serve as persistent volumes for Kubernetes applications. 

Trident meets a broad range of needs in the development and deployment of enterprise Kubernetes applications. With this release, your organization now gets advanced data management and protection capabilities to maintain uptime and to prevent data loss, while simplifying high-confidence deployment. And to protect both your data and your enterprise, the integrated application-aware portability of Trident enables disaster recovery and business continuity use cases. 

Making NetApp the best storage for Kubernetes 

We feel the investment that NetApp is making in driving enterprise data management capabilities for containerized workloads hasn’t gone unnoticed. Gartner® has published the “Critical Capabilities for Primary Storage Platforms” for 2024.  Once again, for the third year in a row, NetApp is ranked #1 for Containers Use Case.[1] 

We believe this rating is possible due to the advanced data management that ONTAP and Trident deliver for Kubernetes applications.  

Automated provisioning 

Trident excels in automating the provisioning of industry-leading NetApp storage for Kubernetes applications, whether on premises or in the cloud. This automation simplifies the process of setting up persistent volumes, so your developers can focus on application development rather than on storage management. Key benefits include: 

• Seamless integration. Trident integrates effortlessly with Kubernetes, enabling automatic storage provisioning based on the Container Storage Interface (CSI) specifications. 

• Cost-effective open-source model. Available at no charge as an open-source solution, Trident provides advanced but cost-effective storage management without compromising on features. 

• Declarative workflow support. The ability to support declarative Kubernetes workflows makes storage provisioning predictable, repeatable, and lower risk. 

Advanced data management and protection 

With Trident, you get advanced data management and protection capabilities that maintain the reliability and security of your data. These features are critical for enterprise-grade applications that demand high availability and robust data protection. Key benefits include: 

• Comprehensive data management. Trident supports space-efficient clones, snapshots, and data optimization techniques, including compression and deduplication. 

• Granular protection. You get granular data protection through block-level volume snapshots, maintaining data integrity and availability. 

• Application-aware portability. You can seamlessly migrate entire applications, including their data, across your Kubernetes clusters and cloud environments. 

Disaster recovery and business continuity 

Maintaining business continuity and quick recovery from disasters are a cornerstone of the Trident value proposition. With built-in disaster recovery features, Trident helps your organization maintain uptime and prevent data loss. Key benefits include: 

• Snapshots and replication. Trident uses NetApp SnapMirror® technology for low recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) so that your data can be quickly restored if a failure occurs. 

• Cyber resilience. You get advanced cyber-resilience features, including automated backups and secure replication, to protect against data breaches and ransomware attacks. 

• Business continuity. Your organization maintains continuous operation with fast failover capabilities across zones, regions, and providers, making Trident ideal for hybrid and multicloud environments. 

Trident enables partners such as Google Cloud, Veeam Kasten and Red Hat to provide complete solutions for provisioning, data management, and protection.   

Google Cloud 

Trident now supports Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. With Trident, you can easily provision, orchestrate, and attach persistent volumes to applications on Google Kubernetes Engine, Red Had OpenShift Dedicated, and self-managed Kubernetes clusters that are served from Google Cloud NetApp Volumes storage pools. Built on NetApp ONTAP technology, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes gives you advanced storage management capabilities such as incremental snapshots for data protection and clones. Your team can quickly launch development and testing workloads, increasing developer productivity.   

Veeam Kasten 

NetApp and Veeam Kasten deliver one of the industry’s most advanced data protection and disaster recovery solutions for Kubernetes environments. The joint solution with Trident and Kasten provides enterprise backup and recovery, application resilience, and disaster recovery for Kubernetes environments with near-zero RPO and RTO, and you can manage it in a single intuitive UI. Kasten’s integration through Trident with ONTAP data management and replication technology is an innovative solution in the Kubernetes space. It delivers high availability and significantly reduces unplanned downtime for your IT services that run in Kubernetes.   

Red Hat 

NetApp is partnering with Red Hat to deliver enterprise storage management for OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization. With this joint solution, OpenShift users can employ ONTAP advanced storage management and data protection features for their containerized workloads. OpenShift Virtualization users will also benefit. The unified storage platform supports traditional virtualized workloads and containerized applications in parallel, while simplifying the process of migrating data from traditional VM environments to a containerized deployment model.   

NetApp is now provisioning and protecting more than 157PB of ONTAP persistent storage for our customers’ Kubernetes applications. To join them and to take advantage of the powerful NetApp data management features of Trident, visit our GitHub page and install Trident today. 

^{[1] Jeff Vogel and Chandra Mukhyala, “Critical Capabilities for Primary Storage Platforms,” ID G00802958, Gartner, Inc., September 19, 2024 
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