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NetApp Solutions

NetApp Hybrid Multicloud solutions for Red Hat OpenShift Container workloads

Contributors kevin-hoke banum-netapp
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NetApp is seeing a significant increase in customers modernizing their legacy enterprise applications and building new applications using containers and orchestration platforms built around Kubernetes. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is one example that we see adopted by many of our customers.

Overview

As more and more customers begin adopting containers within their enterprises, NetApp is perfectly positioned to help serve the persistent storage needs of their stateful applications and classic data management needs such as data protection, data security, and data migration. However, these needs are met using different strategies, tools, and methods.

NetApp ONTAP based storage options listed below, deliver security, data protection, reliability, and flexibility for containers and Kubernetes deployments.

  • Self-managed storage in on-premises:

    • NetApp Fabric Attached Storage (FAS), NetApp All Flash FAS Arrays (AFF), NetApp All SAN Array (ASA) and ONTAP Select

  • Provider-managed storage in on-premises:

    • NetApp Keystone provides Storage as a Service (STaaS)

  • Self-managed storage in the cloud:

    • NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP(CVO) provide self managed storage in the hyperscalers

  • Provider-managed storage in the cloud:

    • Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes provide file-based storage in the cloud.

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NetApp BlueXP enables you to manage all of your storage and data assets from a single control plane/interface.

You can use BlueXP to create and administer cloud storage (for example, Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Azure NetApp Files), to move, protect, and analyze data, and to control many on-prem and edge storage devices.

NetApp Trident is a CSI Compliant Storage Orchestrator that enable quick and easy consumption of persistent storage backed by a variety of the above-mentioned NetApp storage options. It is an open-source software maintained and supported by NetApp.

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Business critical container workloads need more than just persistent volumes. Their data management requirements require protection and migration of the application kubernetes objects as well.

Note Application data includes kubernetes objects in addition to the user data: Some examples are as follows:
- kubernetes objects such as pods specs, PVCs, deployments, services
- custom config objects such as config maps and secrets
- persistent data such as Snapshot copies, backups, clones
- custom resources such as CRs and CRDs

NetApp Astra Control, available as both fully-managed and self-managed software, provides orchestration for robust application data management. Refer to the Astra documentation for additional details on the Astra family of products.

This reference documentation provides validation of migration and protection of container-based applications, deployed on RedHat OpenShift container platform, using NetApp Astra Control Center. In addition, the solution provides high-level details for the deployment and the use of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) for managing the container platforms. The document also highlights the details for the integration of NetApp storage with Red Hat OpenShift container platforms using Trident CSI provisioner. Astra Control Center is deployed on the hub cluster and is used to manage the container applications and their persistent storage lifecycle. Finally, it provides a solution for replication and failover and fail-back for container workloads on managed Red Hat OpenShift clusters in AWS (ROSA) using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx ONTAP) as persistent storage.