Cloud providers now offer many interesting services and features that may have you considering using the cloud to run your important business applications. Are you considering moving your business-critical applications to the cloud, but aren’t sure of the best way to deliver the shared storage they need? Moving to the cloud is often not that simple and there are several things that your business-critical applications need that aren’t available natively in the cloud – including enterprise-grade shared storage. This is why you need Veritas!
Veritas Alta Shared Storage is a software-defined storage solution designed for cloud environments. It delivers the parallel access cloud storage your business-critical applications need while also helping to improve application performance and resiliency. It also enables you to architect your IT services to provide the best end-user experience without having to worry about being locked-in to any one provider.
Let’s take a look at some of the storage services that are natively available in the cloud and how Veritas Alta Shared Storage integrates with these services to deliver enterprise-grade shared storage for your business-critical applications.
Cloud Storage Services
While today’s cloud providers offer several advanced features and services, cloud-native block-level shared storage services remain limited. Multi-attach block storage services often lack the enterprise features and functionality needed by most business-critical applications. Figure 1 gives you a quick overview of some shared storage services available natively in the cloud, and how Veritas Alta Shared Storage extends these services to deliver enterprise-grade shared storage in the cloud for business-critical applications.
Figure 1. Cloud-native Shared Storage Overview
Veritas Shared Storage in the Cloud
Veritas Alta Shared Storage allows you to use cloud-native block storage services such as AWS EBS, Azure managed disks and Google Cloud persistent disks to create secure, enterprise grade shared storage that can be used within an application cluster. Veritas Alta Shared Storage eliminates security concerns that arise with NFS storage which is inherently less secure and is visible by default to all systems across the network – which can expose your data to unauthorized users who may be able to gain access to your cloud environment.
Figure 2. Veritas Alta Shared Storage in cloud environments with intelligent data caching
Using Veritas Alta Shared Storage also provides better performance than cloud native NFS storage services which are often not suitable for enterprise applications with more demanding performance requirements. Some key benefits of using Veritas Alta Shared Storage:
- Performance – easily configure high performance shared storage in cloud networks using native cloud block storage services. With a Veritas Alta Shared Storage feature called SmartIO (data caching), application reads can be served from ephemeral SSD storage to improve performance and reduce cloud storage costs, while writes can be served from a cheaper storage tier.
- Resiliency – the Veritas cluster file system provides parallel access to application data using storage volumes configured using a feature called Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS). FSS enables you to create parallel access storage volumes in the cloud. It can be configured to provide local resiliency as well as resiliency across cloud provider availability zones to minimize the impact of cloud service outages.
- Mobility – Veritas Alta Shared Storage includes an optimized replication feature (Veritas Volume Replicator) that enables data mobility across zones, regions, cloud providers and to on-premises data centers
Persistent Storage for Kubernetes
Veritas Alta Shared Storage can also be used as a persistent storage provider for Kubernetes. Veritas Alta Shared Storage includes a Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin that enables containerized applications in Kubernetes to run on Veritas Alta Shared Storage persistent volumes and persistent volume snapshots. When using Veritas Alta Shared Storage as part of the Veritas Alta Application Resiliency package, you get full DR capability for your entire Kubernetes cluster.
Figure 3. Veritas Alta Shared Storage used as a persistent storage provider for Kubernetes
Veritas Alta Shared Storage for Kubernetes has an advanced deployment architecture whereby it runs as a containerized application in a Kubernetes cluster. This significantly reduces your time to value and makes it very easy to provide persistent storage for your applications – with a native user experience that Kubernetes users are familiar with.
Summary
Having the right technology to run your IT services in the cloud is key to providing the best and smoothest experience for your end users. Veritas Alta Shared Storage delivers the enterprise-grade shared storage needed by business-critical applications running in the cloud that have more demanding performance and resiliency requirements. With Veritas Alta Shared Storage, you can run your enterprise IT applications in the cloud with confidence.
For a full overview of Veritas Alta Shared Storage, check out this whitepaper. You can also see a quick demo here.
