5 reasons you need persistent hybrid cloud storage

Your hybrid cloud needs a storage layer that lets you deploy applications across both public and on-premise clouds and transfer data between these clouds with ease.

The benefits of hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud gives users the flexibility to easily move applications between cloud providers, the chance to use modern application development platforms—like containers—across different cloud environments, and the opportunity to start small and scale up as needed. However, traditional storage arrays are not built to help you achieve these goals. They lack the flexibility, openness, and scalability to support modern hybrid cloud infrastructures.

A persistent, software-defined storage architecture for your hybrid cloud environments is the best option for achieving your business objectives.

Here are 5 reasons why.

1 Portability

Different clouds offer different benefits. It may make sense to keep some applications on site while using different public clouds for other applications, depending on your requirements, budget, data locality, governance, and other factors.

Software-defined storage allows you to integrate workloads from on-premise to public clouds, or among different public cloud providers. You can place data in one cloud or another and access that data across clouds, whenever you need it. This approach ensures that applications get deployed to the right locations to match your workload requirements without locking you into one cloud or another. You benefit from lower IT operations costs as you take advantage of the efficiencies offered by different cloud solutions.

2 Simplicity

Software-defined storage helps developers provision their storage—without having to become storage experts or administrators.

Instead of having to wait days or even weeks for an administrator to provision storage, developers can dynamically provision volumes for both on-premise and public cloud services. Kubernetes operators, for instance, can be used to simplify the initial storage installation, while day two storage management operates from the same Kubernetes user interface (UI).

3 Accessibility

Sometimes your cloud provider may lack services required for a particular application or microservice. Or maybe you need to run some applications in a geography where the provider lacks coverage or is not certified for local governance. In these situations, you need a storage platform that allows you to control your data placement and store your data in optimal locations and clouds.

With a persistent and abstract storage layer, data architects can extend the reach of applications and data to the most appropriate platform .Integration of different applications and services is extended regardless of where the application runs. You can choose where your data resides and direct certain data types to run and be accessible on site, in the cloud, and even across commodity hardware.

4 Efficiency

Software-defined storage makes application development and workflow management more efficient. You no longer need to rewrite applications when you want to port them from one cloud provider to another. Now you can move applications whenever you want without expensive or time-consuming rewrites.

Different infrastructure components integrated into the same solution are not a problem. At Red Hat, we have simplified Kubernetes management by combining a range of infrastructure components, making it easier to manage storage, middleware, developer tools, and our partner ecosystem. This centralization makes the initial installation more manageable and gets developers coding faster—so you can deliver applications more quickly.

5 Flexibility

Having a persistent, underlying storage layer is like pushing different tables together and covering them with a huge tablecloth to unify everything. Much like that tablecloth allows you to slide plates from one table to another, a persistent storage layer lets you use the same software across different clouds, virtual machines, and containers. The persistent storage layer gives you enormous flexibility over traditional storage.

Developers also have the flexibility to choose the storage interfaces for their workload, including block, file, or object storage. Giving developers the ability to deliver data services with one system, regardless of protocol, provides more freedom, boosting productivity and leading to faster and more effective application development.

Why Red Hat?

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions. We have the skills and tools to help you manage storage across your clouds. Red Hat^® OpenShift^® has become known as the operating system for the hybrid cloud, while Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage offers a persistent and integrated storage layer for containerized application development.

Red Hat is the storage provider you can count on to make your hybrid cloud deployments work.

Interested in learning more?

Try our persistent storage for yourself at: learn.openshift.com/persistence