KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America: DataCore Previews HA Features for OpenEBS

At KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2022, DataCore Software Corp. has preview HA features for OpenEBS aimed squarely at IO intensive edge use cases that demand low latency access to highly available native Kubernetes (K8s) storage.

“OpenEBS adoption is entering a hyper-growth phase, increasing more than 400% to 4.5 million K8s volumes provisioned in the third quarter of 2022 – which is impressively up from a fraction of that 12 months ago. Its popularity is now rapidly extending from cloud-native applications at the core to semi-autonomous clusters at the edge,” said Mike Turnlund, head, field operations for containerized storage. “Much of recent adoption is centered on real-time data ingest and fast local processing where unreliable application response and data IO cannot be tolerated.”

Contributions from the open source community to CNCF sandbox projects reveal keen interest in both HA data resiliency and optimized data reduction for small form-factor applications close to application ingest data sources. These workloads require highly available data capture and reliable application IO persistence in demanding environments characterized by high failure rates and unreliable application network connections.

The upcoming release of Mayastor 2.0, a performance engine in OpenEBS built around SPDK, brings additional HA redundancy options in its NVMe oF/TCP data IO fabric. These enhancements are designed to prevent data loss by intelligently routing data around failed IO paths.

The release also includes fine grained thin provisioning management of K8s pooled volumes, enabling IT teams to reduce costs and simplify scale-up when application data and IO growth expands rapidly and unexpectedly. Scaling out is already well addressed in the current Mayastor version 1.0.2.

OpenEBS Mayastor works in the DevOps ecosystem and alongside other tools used for version control, configuration management, CI/CD automation, code repositories, artifact management, test automation, monitoring, and more. As the block storage abstraction layer residing in the data plane, Mayastor delivers persistent storage to stateful applications running on containers, overcoming the old-world problems of developing to specific processors or custom hardware configurations. It is especially designed for composable and disaggregated storage architectures.

OpenEBS is a CNCF sandbox project that was originally built by MayaData, which was acquired by DataCore in November 2021. The company continues to lead K8s storage container development with OpenEBS engineering, product development and support. It is also the primary contributor to the open source Windows Platform Development Kit (WPDK) which acts as a foundation layer to enable SPDK to run on Windows and will be contributing to the Windows Driver Unit Test Framework to further extend this project.