Astra Control offers application-aware data protection services for cloud-native applications that are hosted in both public clouds and on-premises. Astra Control delivers data protection, disaster recovery, and migration capabilities for your containerized application running on Kubernetes.

Astra Trident is an open-source, fully supported storage orchestrator for containers and Kubernetes distributions. It was designed from the beginning to help you meet your containerized applications’ persistence demands using industry-standard interfaces, such as the Container Storage Interface (CSI). With Astra Trident, microservices and containerized applications can take advantage of enterprise-class storage services provided by the NetApp portfolio of storage systems.

Astra Trident is deployed on Kubernetes clusters as pods and provides dynamic storage orchestration services for your Kubernetes workloads. It enables your containerized applications to consume persistent storage quickly and easily from NetApp’s broad portfolio, which includes NetApp ONTAP (NetApp AFF, NetApp FAS, NetApp ONTAP Select, Cloud, and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP), NetApp Element software (NetApp SolidFire), as well as the Azure NetApp Files service, Cloud Volume Service on Google Cloud, and the Cloud Volume Service on AWS. In a FlexPod environment, Astra Trident is used to dynamically provision and manage persistent volumes for containers that are backed by NetApp FlexVol volumes and LUNs hosted on an ONTAP storage platform such as NetApp AFF and FAS systems and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Trident also plays a key role in the implementation of application protection schemes delivered by Astra Control. For more information about Astra Trident, see the Astra Trident documentation.

To use Astra Trident, you need supported storage backend. A Trident backend defines the relationship between Trident and a storage system. It tells Trident how to communicate with that storage system and how Trident should provision volumes from it. Trident will automatically offer up storage pools from backends that together match the requirements defined by a storage class.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a software-defined storage offering that delivers advanced data management for file and block workloads. With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you can optimize your cloud storage costs and increase application performance while enhancing data protection, security, and compliance.

Key benefits include:

Cloud Central provides a centralized location to access and manage NetApp cloud data services. These services enable you to run critical applications in the cloud, create automated DR sites, back up your data, and effectively migrate and control data across multiple clouds. For more information, see Cloud Central.

Cloud Manager is an enterprise-class, SaaS-based management platform that enables IT experts and cloud architects to centrally manage their hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure using NetApp’s cloud solutions. It provides a centralized system for viewing and managing your on-premises and cloud storage, supporting hybrid, multiple cloud providers and accounts. For more information, see Cloud Manager.

Connector is an instance that enables Cloud Manager to manage resources and processes within public cloud environment. A Connector is required to use many features that Cloud Manager provides. A Connector can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises network.

Connector is supported in the following locations:

To learn more about Connector, see this link.

A NetApp cloud infrastructure monitoring tool, Cloud Insights enables you to monitor performance and utilization for your Kubernetes clusters managed by Astra Control Center. Cloud Insights correlates storage usage to workloads. When you enable the Cloud Insights connection in Astra Control Center, telemetry information shows in Astra Control Center UI pages.

NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager allows you to monitor your ONTAP storage clusters from a single redesigned, intuitive interface that delivers intelligence from community wisdom and AI analytics. It provides comprehensive operational, performance, and proactive insights into the storage environment and the virtual machines (VMs) running on it. When an issue occurs with the storage infrastructure, Unified Manager can notify you about the details of the issue to help with identifying the root cause. The VM dashboard gives you a view into the performance statistics for the VM so that you can investigate the entire I/O path from the VMware vSphere host down through the network and finally to the storage. Some events also provide remedial actions that can be taken to rectify the issue. You can configure custom alerts for events so that when issues occur, you are notified through email and SNMP Traps. Active IQ Unified Manager enables planning for the storage requirements of your users by forecasting capacity and usage trends to proactively act before issues arise, preventing reactive short-term decisions that can lead to additional problems in the long term.

Cisco Intersight is a SaaS platform that delivers intelligent automation, observability, and optimization for traditional and cloud-native applications and infrastructure. The platform helps drive change with IT teams and delivers an operating model designed for hybrid cloud.

Cisco Intersight provides the following benefits:

There are two modes of management operations possible with Cisco Intersight: UCSM Managed Mode (UMM) and Intersight Managed Mode (IMM). You can select the native UMM or IMM for the fabric-attached Cisco UCS Systems during initial setup of the Fabric Interconnects. In this solution, native UMM is used.

The following image shows the Cisco Intersight dashboard.

The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a container application platform that brings together CRI-O and Kubernetes and provides an API and web interface to manage these services. CRI-O is an implementation of the Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface (CRI) to enable using Open Container Initiative (OCI) compatible runtimes. It is a lightweight alternative to using Docker as the runtime for Kubernetes.

OpenShift Container Platform allows customers to create and manage containers. Containers are standalone processes that run within their own environment, independent of operating system and the underlying infrastructure. OpenShift Container Platform helps develop, deploy, and manage container-based applications. It provides a self-service platform to create, modify, and deploy applications on demand, thus enabling faster development and release life cycles. OpenShift Container Platform has a microservices-based architecture of smaller, decoupled units that work together. It runs on top of a Kubernetes cluster, with data about the objects stored in etcd, a reliable clustered key-value store.

The following image is an overview of the Red Hat OpenShift Container platform.

VMware vSphere is a virtualization platform for holistically managing large collections of infrastructures (resources including CPUs, storage, and networking) as a seamless, versatile, and dynamic operating environment. Unlike traditional operating systems that manage an individual machine, VMware vSphere aggregates the infrastructure of an entire data center to create a single powerhouse with resources that can be allocated quickly and dynamically to any application in need.

For more information, see VMware vSphere.

This solution can be extended to any FlexPod environment that is running supported versions of software, firmware, and hardware as defined in the NetApp Interoperability Matrix Tool and Cisco UCS Hardware Compatibility List. The OpenShift cluster is installed on FlexPod in a Bare Metal fashion as well as on VMware vSphere.

Only a single instance of Astra Control Center is required to manage multiple OpenShift (k8s) clusters, while Trident CSI is installed on each OpenShift cluster. Astra Control Center can be installed on any of these OpenShift cluster. In this solution, Astra Control Center is installed on the OpenShift bare- metal cluster.

The following table lists the FlexPod hardware and software revisions for OpenShift.

The following table lists the software versions for OpenShift on AWS.

Next: FlexPod for OpenShift Container Platform 4 bare-metal installation.