Announcing Trident 25.06 - Enhancing Kubernetes data management

We’re thrilled to announce the release of NetApp® Trident™ 25.06 software. This release delivers new features and enhancements designed to elevate your Kubernetes data management experience. Trident has consistently simplified and standardized the management of containers and services, enabling developers to build and deploy applications with speed, flexibility, and agility. With this release, we continue to enhance the ability of Trident to meet the growing needs of enterprise-grade applications in Kubernetes environments. 

Trident value proposition

Today, enterprises are increasingly adopting Kubernetes because it’s inherently flexible and scalable. However, Kubernetes wasn’t originally designed to handle the persistent data needs of enterprise applications, which require advanced data management capabilities such as snapshots, cloning, replication, data optimization, and advanced security features. Trident addresses these challenges by providing integrated NetApp storage solutions with built-in data protection for Kubernetes workloads on premises and in the cloud. 

Trident automates the provisioning of industry-leading NetApp storage, so applications benefit from storage efficiencies (compression, compaction, deduplication), cyber resilience (snapshots, replication), and automated backup and disaster recovery capabilities. Available as an open-source solution, Trident enables seamless provisioning and protection of Kubernetes workloads, maintaining uptime, preventing data loss, and providing disaster recovery and business continuity. 

New features in Trident 25.06

Volume group snapshots 

With the introduction of the volume group snapshots feature, Trident now brings the concept of "consistency group" to Kubernetes. This Container Storage Interface (CSI) feature allows you to create snapshots of multiple persistent volumes at the same point in time. This is particularly beneficial for KubeVirt/OpenShift Virtualization VMs, which may have multiple VM disks as persistent volumes. With this feature, you can take snapshots of all VM disks simultaneously, achieving consistency across all volumes. 

Benefit: Simplified, consistent snapshot management for applications with multiple persistent volumes enhance data protection and recovery capabilities for VMs. 

NVMe/TCP Trident support for NetApp ASA systems 

Trident 25.06 introduces support for the NVMe over TCP protocol for NetApp ASA systems in addition to the existing iSCSI protocol support. NVMe/TCP offers faster data transfer speeds and lower latency compared to traditional block storage protocols. 

Benefit: Enhanced performance and reduced latency for data-intensive applications provide a more efficient, responsive storage experience. 

Improved Trident scalability and performance 

In this multirelease effort, we’re enhancing the parallelism capabilities of Trident to manage more operations efficiently. Both components of Trident architecture—the node (general availability for iSCSI) and the controller (in tech preview)—are being optimized to handle increased workloads and operations. 

Benefit: Improved scalability and performance enable Trident to manage larger Kubernetes environments and more complex workloads with ease, maintaining high availability and reliability. 

Better security for SMB shares 

Security enhancements in Trident 25.06 include the ability to secure persistent storage provided through SMB to Windows nodes within a Kubernetes cluster. You can now apply access control lists (ACLs) with Active Directory users and groups. 

Benefit: Enhanced security for SMB shares means that only authorized users and groups can access sensitive data, which improves data protection and compliance. 

Enhancements to Trident protect 

The Trident protect solution is significantly improved in this release, including: 

• Enhanced restore times through optional scheduling of more frequent full backups 
• Improved granularity of application definition and selective restore with Group-Version-Kind (GVK) filtering 
• Efficient resynchronization and reverse replication when using AppMirrorRelationship (AMR) with the NetApp SnapMirror^® feature, to avoid full persistent volume claim (PVC) replication 
• Added ability to use EKS Pod Identity to create AppVault buckets, so you no longer need to specify a secret with the bucket credentials 
• Added support for replication with AMR and SnapMirror for NVMe/TCP back ends 

Benefit: Faster and more efficient disaster recovery, along with greater control over application restoration, means minimal downtime and data loss during recovery operations. 

Conclusion

The release of Trident 25.06 underscores NetApp's commitment to providing advanced data management solutions that empower enterprises to harness the full potential of Kubernetes. With features like volume group snapshots, NVMe/TCP support for NetApp ASA enhanced scalability and performance, better security for SMB shares, and enhancements to Trident protect, Trident continues to simplify and enhance Kubernetes data management for our customers. 

Explore more and get started today. Visit the Trident home page.