Simplify Kubernetes Environments with the HPE CSI Driver

Introduction

Container adoption has had a very clear effect on modern business. An ESG research study of IT professionals whose organizations are using containers or planning to use them to support production applications in the next 12 months found that 53% of the respondents said improving modern DevOps practices was their catalyst for container adoption. These respondents identified several benefits of leveraging container technology—the three most commonly reported benefits related to:

The value that container-based environments provide to application development initiatives has fueled increased adoption for the technology. In a separate ESG research survey conducted in 2019, 41% of storage decision makers indicated that their organizations were using containers in production. An additional 33% reported that they were using containers to support dev/test and pre-production applications and planned to use them for production within the following 12 months.²

As organizations scale their production Kubernetes environments, however, they often discover a hard truth. The optimal infrastructure environment for Kubernetes container-based workloads has different and more extensive requirements than what traditional applications typically need. Simply staying with the status quo is often not the right answer. Understanding these differences—and leveraging technologies and partners that can address the needs of container-based environments—is essential for any organization seeking to maximize the benefits of container-based, or Kubernetes, environments.

HPE, a leader in IT infrastructure, offers a powerful, versatile platform that not only supports the needs of enterprise container workloads, but also does so in a manner that allows development teams to maximize the value of containers and Kubernetes to the whole company. Playing a key role in delivering these benefits, HPE’s Container Storage Interface (CSI) technology simplifies and optimizes container integration for persistent storage across modern, hybrid, and multi-cloud infrastructure environments.

Infrastructure-related challenges with enterprise-scale container environments may result in more IT complexity overall. Three quarters (75%) of IT professionals surveyed by ESG said they believe IT is more complex compared with two years ago. Among those who identify IT as being more complex, almost a third (28%) cite increases in applications that leverage modern architectures, such as Kubernetes, as a top reason behind the complexity increase.⁵

ESG also found that 36% of IT leaders inside organizations that are leveraging or planning to leverage container-based application environments believe that managing these applications in a hybrid environment is one of their top container-specific challenges. The essential role that storage plays in a container environment is reflected in the challenges these organizations face. Some of the most significant persistent-storage-specific challenges relate to managing effectively across a hybrid, multi-cloud environment; speeding up provisioning; and supporting application portability (see Figure 2).⁶

Figure 2. Top Challenges with Persistent Storage for Container-based Environments

In general, what would you say are your organization’s biggest persistent storage-related challenges in terms of its container-based environment? (Percent of respondents, N=274, multiple responses accepted)

• It allows users to expand volumes, clone volumes, or take snapshots of data for reuse as prescribed by Kubernetes administrators.

In turn, those special characteristics of HPE’s CSI driver provide multiple real-world benefits:

• Excellent performance and availability— The driver connects with HPE’s portfolio of enterprise storage technologies including its all-flash solutions, NVMe-based HPE Primera, and HPE Nimble storage. When combined with HPE’s Peer Persistence technology, it can help organizations create a continuous data availability environment across multiple sites and multiple HPE storage arrays to deliver high availability even in the event of site-wide or natural disasters

• Consistent experience across a distributed hybrid cloud environment— The single HPE CSI driver supports HPE’s storage technologies running in both the data center and in the cloud (with HPE Cloud Volumes). This means developers can enjoy the flexibility of working with a single piece of technology, knowing that their code will work properly across all locations.

• Accelerated application development— When storage is kept separate from the Kubernetes cluster, existing clusters can be taken down and redeployed without impacting the data. The data stays protected and can be made available again as soon as a new cluster is provisioned. In other words, the development environment can be deployed and recovered quickly, without too much concern over the safety of the data.

In addition to application development projects, HPE’s CSI driver accelerates organizations’ digital initiatives, too, providing:

• Storage multi-tenancy for Kubernetes environments— HPE offers the ability to control performance on a per-volume basis with quality-of-service (QoS) controls to ensure that application experience stays consistent as the container environment scales and evolves over time. Within a managed service provider’s site, multi-tenancy is a critical factor to address. HPE reports that it already has MSP customers leveraging its CSI driver for their Kubernetes application deployments.

• Accelerated deployment of development environments— With HPE’s cloning technology integrated with its CSI technology, cluster admins can quickly and easily set up new developer environments and workspaces, adding efficiency both from a storage reduction perspective and time to value.

• Support for IT transformation initiatives—HPE simplifies the integration and management of container-based and traditional application environments, allowing IT organizations to accelerate IT transformation initiatives, offering more control to developers and allowing IT personnel more time to focus on higher business-level goals.