Kioxia Enhanced KumoScale Storage Software Based on NVMe-oF to Include Kubernetes CSI-Compliant Snapshots and Clones

Kioxia America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the US-based subsidiary of Kioxia Corporation, has enhanced its KumoScale storage software based on NVMe-oF to include Kubernetes CSI-compliant snapshots and clones.

The addition of these storage functions enables KumoScale software to reduce the time pressures associated with backup processes for large, stateful applications such as databases – while consuming very little storage space. These features also bring users the ability to clone and then non-disruptively modify production data for development, test, or quality assurance (QA) purposes.

The backup of a large database can take many hours to complete, and storage volumes must not be written during the process. For use cases in which taking the database offline for a lengthy backup window is impractical, admins can now make a snapshot of the volume in meres, and then release to application to continue working while backup proceeds. KumoScale software’s snapshot feature creates a frozen moment in time, allowing the data as it existed at that moment to remain available to applications at low storage cost.

The software’s clones feature allows for the creation of many new volumes that start as clean copies of a snapshot. Because only changed data is stored, even the largest data volumes can be inexpensively copied for use in query development and QA tests, without the danger of modifying production data.

Snapshot Support for Kubernetes Deployments
Additionally, KumoScale software can now be used with the CSI-compatible snapshot feature within Kubernetes 1.17, which empowers users to incorporate snapshot operations in a cluster-agnostic way. It also enables application-consistent snapshots of Kubernetes stateful sets, directly from the Kubernetes command line.

“What we are doing with snapshots in the context of Kubernetes continues to position KumoScale software as a leader in providing high-performance storage infrastructure for the modern, containerized cloud,” noted Joel Dedrick, VP and GM, networked storage software. “The Kubernetes Storage SIG has identified snapshot operations as critical for many stateful workloads, and KumoScale software now provides native snapshot support for Kubernetes deployments.“

Making Cloud-Based Disaggregation Reality
The ability of NVMe-oF technology to enable low-latency access to flash over a network has made solving the IT resource disaggregation challenge easier, and KumoScale software’s snapshot and clone features open the door for NVMe-oF use cases. Snapshotting broadens the appeal of the software’s disaggregated storage technology.

Snapshot and clone features address following use cases:

Populating production volume for Test and Dev purposes, such as parallel QA
Forking a production volume for Test and Dev, including the testing of new queries on DB volume
Volume migration across on-premise, cloud and archive

Resource:
Blog on KumoScale

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