Open Source Community Rook Embraces Quantum's Cloud-Native Storage Project

Quantum Corp. announced that Rook, the open source project it initiated just over a year ago, has gained support in the developer community and continues to deliver against key enterprise feature requirements as the project progresses.

Rook provides the benefits of cloud infrastructures to public cloud and also on-premise environments, including the ability to flexibly allocate object, block and – in the future – file storage to different application and business units. The project has been developed to enable organizations to modernize their data centers with dynamic application orchestration for distributed storage systems running in on-premise, cloud-native environments.

Self-Managing, Self-Scaling and Self-Healing
Rook turns distributed storage software into self-managing, self-scaling and self-healing storage services. It does so by automating the tasks of a storage administrator, including deployment, bootstrapping, configuration, provisioning, scaling, upgrading, migration, DR, monitoring and resource management. In addition, it capitalizes on the power of the underlying cloud-native container management, scheduling and orchestration platform to perform its duties.

Integration Into Cloud-Native Environments
Designed for Kubernetes and other evolving cloud-native environments, Rook leverages extension points and provides a seamless experience for scheduling, lifecycle management, resource management, security, monitoring and user experience.

Benefits include:

Software-defined storage running on commodity hardware;
File, block and object storage presentations;
Hyper-scale or hyper-converged storage options;
Elastic storage that can easily scale up or down;
Zero-touch management; and
Integrated data protection with snapshot, cloning and versioning.

Community Momentum
Community support has accelerated as companies and users have deployed Rook in testing and staging environments (on-premise and public cloud):

Rook is in the top 0.2% of the most popular projects on GitHub, with more than 1,750 stars.
It has over 40 contributors.
It has more than 600,000 container downloads.

“We’re excited for a true cloud-native storage platform. Having experienced the complexity of running Ceph on Kubernetes, Rook provides the stability and power of an established software-defined storage solution with the ease of use of native Kubernetes integration. With the latest release of Rook, we’re looking to implement it as a core part of our storage platform,” said Hunter Nield, CTO, Acaleph Pte Ltd.

“On my farm, it’s important to make efficient use of resources I already have. With Rook’s Kubernetes-native design, I’m able to use commodity hardware without sacrificing redundancy for my storage or availability of my services. That’s why Rook fits perfectly in my farm’s metrics and automation systems, and I follow its development closely,” said Bryan Zubrod, founder, Zubrod Farms.

“I’m really excited to see Rook evolve to a fully production-grade system. I’ve used and contr,ted to it from an early stage and can’t wait to use it in even more production systems,” said Lucas Käldström, founder, luxas labs.

A beta version of Rook (release 0.7) will be available this month, followed by a production-ready version in early 2018.

Quantum plans to deploy Rook within commercial enterprise storage appliances by April 2018.