The intelligent data infrastructure company, NetApp®, has introduced an advanced data management platform specifically tailored for Red Hat OpenShift. The newly launched solution offers additional benefits in terms of increased reliability and scalability for virtualization platforms operating within on-premises and cloud infrastructures. Leveraging the new functionalities, businesses can benefit from enhanced performance in terms of backup, recovery, and day-to-day operations, thus providing predictable support for the management of virtual machines (VMs) and containers.
The increasing popularity of virtualization as a key factor driving innovation, as evidenced by the fact that 71% of organizations have reported more than half of their IT infrastructures to be virtualized, has raised concerns about the capacity of current infrastructure in processing AI-driven data. Conventional solutions involving full-disk scans result in long backup times and uncertain recovery operations. The latest development by NetApp® provides a solution to these challenges through the implementation of block-level change tracking, guaranteeing high-speed, cost-efficient data protection.
Dallas Olson, Chief Commercial Officer at NetApp, emphasized the operational impact of the new release: “When IT teams face slow scanning and backup processes, they often struggle to meet recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements. NetApp and Red Hat’s latest innovations deliver consistent and predictable backup and recovery performance, even as virtual machine environments continue to grow. With these capabilities, customers can now migrate, run, and protect large-scale virtual machine and containerized environments on the Red Hat OpenShift platform with greater efficiency, predictability, and operational confidence.”
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Strengthening the Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem
The cooperation between NetApp and Red Hat has been intensified to facilitate the provision of a seamless experience in both hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems. This helps organizations migrate their apps and data from on-premises to cloud environments.
Key updates to the NetApp-Red Hat technology stack includes:
- Enhanced Backup & Recovery for OpenShift Virtualization: A cost-effective and efficient way to back up your NetApp ONTAP® storage system has been made even more powerful, offering an “incremental-forever” solution using CBT (Changed Block Tracking). The use of this technology reduces the processing capacity required during backups and eliminates the need for expensive rehydration steps, thus increasing the efficiency of your recovery processes.
- Orchestrated Disaster Recovery (DR): As part of the current public preview release, NetApp Disaster Recovery now provides additional functionality for virtual machines that run on Kubernetes. It is a disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solution that streamlines failover and failback operations, making it a reliable backup option.
- Integration with Google Cloud: Google Cloud NetApp Volumes and Trident CSI driver have now been generally made available and tested on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud. This allows users to control both VM and container instances in the cloud with just one operational model.
- Parallelism for NetApp Trident Scale Out: In order to avoid performance issues related to the storage, NetApp Trident can now perform several storage operations at once. This particular aspect is very relevant when working with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes.
Steve Gordon, Senior Director of Product Management, Hybrid Cloud Platforms at Red Hat, highlighted the necessity of modernizing recovery models:
“Traditional disaster recovery models were not built for the scale and speed required by today’s virtualized environments. As the scale and complexity of enterprise virtualization environments continue to grow, our work with NetApp is intended to help customers meet their most critical challenges. Together, we are modernizing data protection and disaster recovery for Red Hat OpenShift to help provide more predictable business outcomes and a more solid foundation for hybrid cloud strategies.”
A Legacy of Intelligent Infrastructure
NetApp, with over 30 years of experience in IT, is still perfecting its Intelligent Data Infrastructure that enables companies all over the world to use data as a source of growth. Dedication of storage, services and controls enables companies to effectively respond to change, always staying ahead of vendor lock-ins.
Working with Red Hat is an important step toward IT modernization, as the organization can be assured that data will be robust, protected and available throughout deployment of AI-based systems.
