NetApp Updates to Trident Automated Provisioner Solving Persistent Storage Challenge for Containers

NetApp, Inc. announced updates to Trident, its automated provisioner solving the persistent storage challenge for containers, a verified architecture for Red Hat OpenShift Container platform on NetApp HCI, as well as enhanced flexibility for DevOps on both the company’s Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud platform and Cloud Volumes for AWS.

This announcement follows the company’s recent acquisition of StackPointCloud, an advanced Kubernetes-as-a-service platform that directly supports the application orchestration capabilities across clouds. Following the acquisition, the firm launched the NetApp Kubernetes Service, a universal control plane for managed Kubernetes, which simplifies the deployment of a Kubernetes cluster to the cloud. The company also recently announced Ansible modules for element, which provide integration for NetApp HCI and SolidFire solutions; ONTAP, which provides integrated solutions for the company’s AFF and FAS systems; and SANtricity, which provides integrated solutions for the firm’s E-Series systems. This capability enables customers to use familiar tools to define and deploy consistent infrastructure for development, test, and production.

In-house developer teams play an important role in the ability of a business to pursue new revenue streams, but the long-standing cultural divide between development and operations has traditionally inhibited collaboration and led to slow development cycles. By creating data services that help build trust between developers and operations, the company aims to provide the tools that, together with DevOps techniques and methods, enable companies to transform this paradigm.

“Delivering business value from data often depends on developers’ ability to rapidly innovate through methods like DevOps, but organizations often lack the infrastructure to support the flexible, collaborative approach required for a true DevOps culture,” said Brad Anderson, SVP and GM, cloud infrastructure, NetApp. “NetApp provides data products and services that are purpose-built to help developers and operations better align, while also enabling the technology independence that developers need to keep creating and driving value and strategic advantage for the business.“

Build clouds to deliver services and empower DevOps
Trident, the firm’s automated storage provisioner for Docker, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, now supports Cloud Volumes ONTAP; supports backup and restore using NetApp snapshot copies; and offers multicloud support. Available for download.

Trident:

Supports the company’s portfolio: HCI, ONTAP, SolidFire, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and more.
Offers extensive production support for persistence on container platforms, enabling self-service storage and data management through the native language of the container.
Drives efficiency by simplifying and automating persistent container storage, removing the need for manual tickets for provisioning.
Enables agile dev-test-deployment processes, reducing human interaction in the development-test-release process and increasing code quality and customer satisfaction.
Improves data consistency and security with scalable container management solutions.
As an open-source project, developers are constantly improving Trident with new capabilities.

Deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container platform on firm’s HCI Verified Architecture enables DevOps to manage containers in private cloud by:

Delivering applications more quickly through accelerated application building, deployment and management.
Empowering DevOps with self-service that helps to provide an ‘it just works’ experience, making it for teams to build, deploy and scale applications with containers and a simpler hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Simplifying and automating operations to deliver a cloud application platform while helping to limit the time or complexity associated with designing a custom platform.

Inspire innovation with cloud for DevOps
The company’s Cloud Volumes Service offers cloud-native file storage that delivers performance and advanced data management to cloud applications.

Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud platform is a no-ops service with a native experience, including support from Google, Google Cloud UI for provisioning and management, and three performance levels, standard, premium, and extreme. It provides both NFS and SMB protocol services to support a full range of what GCP customers demand for their workloads.

Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud platform:

Make data-driven decisions faster by moving analytics to the cloud.
Safeguard databases in performance file services in the cloud to allow high-speed testing and iteration across applications and workloads, with the ability to revert to the original database if anything goes wrong.
Speed time to value with fast file copies, enabling developers to clone hundreds of environments, saving testing and QA time.
Accepting production-level data on the Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud platform, in addition to expanded availability for US-Central1 and US-East4.

The company’s Cloud Volumes for AWS provides secure NFS and SMB data management services for AWS. Cloud Volumes for AWS is available from the firm and partners soon to be listed on AWS Marketplace and with expanded availability to international markets.

Cloud Volumes for AWS:

Enhanced flexibility for DevOps with REST API support and preview for Cloud Backup service.
Delivers enterprise services to cloud applications, allowing workloads to run in the cloud with speed and predictability, without sacrificing flexibility.
Supports data lakes with multiple data sources and simultaneous multi-application data sharing.
Eliminates the need to re-architect file-based applications for the cloud; they can simply be moved to the cloud without development cycles.
Expanded availability in regions across APAC and EMEA, including Sydney, Tokyo, Dublin, Frankfurt, and London.

Additional ressources:
NetApp blog
NetApp Cloud Data Services solutions
NetApp cloud infrastructure solutions
NetApp storage systems and software solutions
NetApp Insight 2018,