Infinidat sets a new standard for enterprise storage in container environments

Infinidat, a leading provider of multi-petabyte data storage solutions, has announced the general availability of its Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for Kubernetes and other CNCF-compliant containers environments. The new InfiniBox CSI Driver helps users of reliable, fast InfiniBox storage systems efficiently manage their storage within container platforms that support the CSI standard. The InfiniBox CSI Driver is a direct result of customer demand to bring the automation and ease of use of InfiniBox to DevOps practices and demonstrates Infinidat’s continued commitment to the Kubernetes ecosystem, as validated in the recent GigaOm Radar for Data Storage for Kubernetes.

Storage becomes a critical challenge as container adoption grows and customers demand more scale, flexibility and standardisation. The Container Storage Interface (CSI) is the new standard for orchestrating control plane operations on file and block storage. Among other key features, the InfiniBox CSI Driver enables users to:

• Deploy hundreds of thousands of persistent volumes per InfiniBox
• Manage persistent volumes backed by iSCSI, NFS or Fibre Channel protocols
• Control multiple InfiniBox systems within a single Kubernetes cluster
• Manage InfiniBox snapshots and clones, including restoring from snapshots
• Clone, extend and manage persistent volumes created outside of the InfiniBox CSI Driver

Demonstrating Infinidat’s commitment to mission-critical Kubernetes deployments, the InfiniBox CSI Driver has been fully certified with major commercial Kubernetes distributions Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition. Clients can access the Infinidat Operator for the InfiniBox CSI Driver through the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog, simplifying deployment in Red Hat environments and users of other Kubernetes platforms can deploy with Helm charts. The InfiniBox CSI Driver is also listed in VMware Solutions Exchange.

Mikhail Solovyov, Product Development Director for DataLine, said: “Starting from 2019 we’re seeing growing popularity for our ‘Containers-as-a-Service’ offering powered by Kubernetes. Our customers are launching highly demanding containerised environments, leveraging reliability and scalability of this ecosystem. Working with storage traditionally is a challenge in Kubernetes environments. The Infinidat CSI Driver will allow us and our customers to use the high performing, reliable InfiniBox system in a containerised environment. This new capability simplifies storage integration in Kubernetes clusters and makes InfiniBox even more convenient for us. I’m sure that our Kubernetes customers will appreciate this InfiniBox innovation.”

“The pace of change in containerised environments is incredible. This announcement gives customers more control over their container environments to accelerate innovation and discovery without having to worry about storage keeping up,” said Gregory Touretsky, Sr Director, Product Management at Infinidat. “We’re taking all the economic benefits InfiniBox has to offer – high performance, high reliability and low cost of ownership at multi-petabyte scale – and making them available across the emerging Kubernetes universe.”