Symcloud CNS
An Enterprise Storage for Kubernetes
Imagine a data protection solution that not only safeguards your storage but also your applications, metadata, configurations, and secrets. Symcloud Storage (also known as Rakuten’s Robin CNS – Robin Cloud Native Storage) is one such advanced containerized storage solution.
It provides enterprise-grade performance, reliability, and data management capabilities. It is a CSI-compliant block storage solution that seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes-native administrative tools such as Kubectl, Helm Charts, and Operators through standard APIs, CLI and easy-to-use GUI. It seamlessly operates on-premises and integrates with any of your cloud service providers. Its full automation substantially reduces recovery and migration time, eliminates human errors, and introduces cutting-edge functionality.
In this blog, the below topics will be covered:
- What is an Enterprise Storage Solution?
- Enterprise Storage for Stateless and Stateful Applications
- Why Stateful Application need Kubernetes-aware Storage?
- What is Symcloud Storage?
- Symcloud Storage Key Features
What is an Enterprise Storage Solution?
An enterprise storage solution is a comprehensive system designed to meet the data storage needs of large organizations and businesses. These solutions are essential for managing and storing vast amounts of data efficiently, securely, and reliably. Enterprise storage solutions typically encompass hardware, software, and management tools, and they are designed to handle a wide range of data types, from structured databases to unstructured files.
Key components of an enterprise storage solution include:
- Storage Hardware
- Storage Software
- Storage Management Tools
- Security and Compliance
- Scalability and Redundancy
Enterprise Storage for Stateless and Stateful Applications
Enterprise Storage Solutions in terms of containers refer to the storage infrastructure and strategies designed to support containerized applications in large organizations. Containers are lightweight, portable, and scalable units that package an application and its dependencies, making them ideal for modern, agile, and cloud-native development practices. However, managing storage for containers introduces unique challenges that require specific solutions. When using container-based solutions such as Kubernetes, applications are broken down into multiple components and these components scale independently interacting with your data in distinct ways.
Furthermore, the Enterprise Storage Solutions differ when it comes to supporting stateless and stateful applications. These two types of applications have distinct storage requirements based on how they handle and manage data.
Stateless Applications:
Stateless applications do not store critical state information on the server or in local memory. They treat each request or transaction independently and do not rely on data persistence between sessions. Common examples include web servers, load balancers, and stateless microservices.
They often have minimal storage requirements as they do not need to store user sessions or data between requests. Storage for stateless applications is typically focused on code and configuration, which can be version-controlled and stored in shared file systems or object storage.
These applications can leverage scalable and cost-effective storage solutions, such as distributed file systems, object storage, or content delivery networks (CDNs).
Stateless applications are inherently easier to scale since they do not rely on maintaining user session data. You can add more instances of stateless services easily to handle increased traffic.
Stateful Applications:
Stateful applications maintain critical data or state between sessions or transactions. Examples include databases, message queues, and applications that require user sessions and data persistence. Such applications have substantial storage needs to persist data reliably. This data can include user profiles, transaction records, session data, and more.
For stateful applications, Data consistency and durability are essential, requiring storage solutions that support transactions and data integrity. Hence, traditional relational databases, NoSQL databases, and distributed storage systems are commonly used. These solutions provide mechanisms for data durability, consistency, and high availability, often using techniques like replication and sharding.
Scaling stateful applications can be more complex than stateless ones due to data management challenges. Hence, Regular backups, snapshots, and disaster recovery plans are essential components of storage solutions for these applications.
Stateful applications often handle sensitive data, so security and compliance features, such as encryption and access controls, are crucial for protecting data and meeting regulatory requirements.
Why Stateful Applications Need Kubernetes-aware Storage
- Persistent Data: Stateful applications store critical data that needs to persist beyond the lifecycle of individual containers or pods. When these containers are moved or rescheduled, their data must remain accessible and consistent.
- Data Management: Stateful applications often require complex data management tasks, such as backups, snapshots, and data migrations. Kubernetes-aware storage solutions integrate with Kubernetes to facilitate these operations seamlessly.
- Scaling: Scaling stateful applications can be challenging without Kubernetes-aware storage. These solutions enable dynamic provisioning and scaling of storage volumes to accommodate the increasing demands of stateful applications.
- Data Consistency: Maintaining data consistency is critical for stateful applications, especially in distributed environments. Kubernetes-aware storage solutions offer features like distributed locking and synchronization to ensure data consistency.
- High Availability: Stateful applications often require high availability to minimize downtime and data loss. Kubernetes-aware storage solutions provide features like automatic failover and redundancy to enhance availability.
- Integration with StatefulSets: Kubernetes StatefulSets are designed to manage stateful applications. Kubernetes-aware storage solutions seamlessly integrate with StatefulSets, simplifying the management of stateful workloads.
- Efficient Data Distribution: When scaling stateful applications, it’s crucial to distribute data efficiently to prevent performance bottlenecks or data imbalances. Kubernetes-aware storage solutions manage data distribution effectively.
- Compliance and Security: Stateful applications often handle sensitive data. Kubernetes-aware storage solutions offer robust security features, such as encryption and access controls, to meet regulatory requirements.
Let us understand Symcloud Storage in more detail.
What is Symcloud Storage?
Symcloud Storage represents a cutting-edge data management solution tailored for Kubernetes, regardless of your distribution choice. By deploying it as a standard Kubernetes operator, you gain seamless integration with essential Kubernetes administrative tools like Kubectl, Helm Charts, and a user-friendly GUI. The beauty of this system lies in its automation capabilities, aligning seamlessly with user-defined policies. It actively oversees all application and storage components from inception to completion. This automation not only accelerates time-to-results but also serves as a fail-safe mechanism, mitigating the risk of human errors.
This comprehensive system is designed for ease of scalability, migration to new environments, and seamless rollbacks triggered with a simple click or automated events. What sets this system apart is its profound commitment to application-aware data protection. This extends to safeguarding not only your application but also its metadata, configuration, and even the most sensitive secrets. To bolster your data’s security, our system also offers advanced encryption capabilities, supported by robust key management, ensuring your peace of mind in every data handling scenario.
Symcloud Storage empowers Developers and DevOps teams by eliminating the need for extensive storage expertise when dealing with intricate applications. This liberation allows them to focus on their primary object, streamlining their workflow. Hence, any organization can start their storage journey quickly with this easy-to-use solution that simplifies application and data management for them.
The Symcloud Storage and Data Management solution automates critical aspects of the data lifecycle, including backup and recovery, snapshots, rollback, and cloning of the complete application state. This automation not only simplifies operations but also ensures enterprise-grade availability, ensuring that your applications are consistently accessible and protected.
Designed from the ground up for exceptional scalability and bare-metal performance, Symcloud Storage is the ideal solution for both network- and storage-intensive workloads. Its capabilities include IOPs-based quality-of-service (QoS) enforcement, dynamic data rebalancing to eliminate hotspots, and automated, policy-driven data locality with affinity and anti-affinity based on both compute and storage components.
Symcloud Storage seamlessly operates on-premises, utilizing your existing disks and arrays, while also offering full integration with any of your preferred cloud providers such as GCP, AWS, Azure, and IBM, delivering hybrid cloud capabilities.
It is also compatible with a diverse range of Kubernetes distributions like IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services, Anthos, RedHat OpenShift, AKS, EKS, and many more. Users of these distributions can seamlessly integrate Symcloud Storage, leveraging its advanced data management features within our cloud-native software-defined storage solution.
Symcloud Storage can be used to support stateful applications, including various database systems such as NoSQL, RDBMS, Timeseries and Big Data.
Let’s now have a look at some of the key benefits of Symcloud Storage.
High-performance storage solution for Kubernetes
Symcloud Storage sets the standard as the highest-performing storage solution for Kubernetes, surpassing its nearest competitor by 2-3 times. It consistently delivers bare-metal performance across a spectrum of workloads, ensuring exceptional speed and reliability.
Elevated Data Reliability with Swift Failover Capabilities
Symcloud Storage redefines the standards of data reliability, offering rapid failover mechanisms to address potential issues related to disks, servers, racks, and even data centre outages.
An Enterprise-Grade Storage Solution: Simple, Swift, and Robust
This versatile solution is known for its simplicity, speed, and potency, effectively transforming a spectrum of storage resources, including HDD, SSD, NVMe, DAS, SAN, and cloud drives, into a unified, enterprise-grade storage system for use both on-premises and in the cloud.
Safeguarding Systems from Infrastructure Failures
Symcloud Storage brings a robust feature to the table, one that is crucial for maintaining the integrity and availability of your applications. This solution offers an unyielding defense against infrastructure failures. This is achieved through a sophisticated always-incremental backup and restore system meticulously designed to secure your complete application stack.
Application-Aware Snapshots: Fortifying Data Loss Prevention
Symcloud Storage offers a valuable feature that can be a lifeline in the event of data loss due to user errors. With its app-aware snapshots, you gain an added layer of protection against accidental data deletion or the need to retrieve past data versions. These snapshots not only secure your sensitive data in motion and at rest but also provide a safety net in situations where data integrity is compromised.
Automate day-2 operations and lifecycle management tasks
In the lifecycle of your business application, the need for growth and adaptability often arises. As your application expands and demands more storage, additional nodes, and increasing storage disks, it’s crucial to maintain performance predictability and stability. Symcloud Storage addresses these day-2 requirements effectively. It offers a robust command-line interface and an intuitive user interface, empowering you to visualize, manage, and scale your storage resources seamlessly. Whether you need to add volumes, expand existing ones, decommission drives, or create cloud-based storage, Symcloud Storage simplifies the process.
An Enterprise-grade storage seamlessly supporting block and file workloads
Symcloud delivers a top-tier enterprise storage solution designed to handle both block and file workloads with equal finesse, whether your applications run on-premises or in the cloud. This robust platform empowers organizations to achieve unmatched flexibility, scalability, and reliability, all while maintaining the highest standards of data integrity and performance.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Symcloud Storage stands as a groundbreaking data management solution, offering automation for critical tasks like backup, recovery, and snapshots, ensuring unwavering availability.
With a strong focus on performance through features like scaling and data rebalancing, it efficiently handles data-intensive workloads. Its adaptability shines with seamless integration into both on-premises and cloud environments, catering to various Kubernetes distributions. Advanced monitoring and capacity management tools further enhance data efficiency.
For organizations seeking reliability, performance, and scalability, Symcloud Storage simplifies data management, making it an indispensable choice for IT professionals.