Meet Cloud Data Management Needs with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10

The actual data within your clusters is the lifeblood of your applications. As it flows through your systems and services, your entire infrastructure is dependent upon the movement, veracity and management of that data. 

Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) is the open source data component of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, and with the release of version 4.10 of ODF today, we’ve introduced new capabilities and features to aid you as you manage the data in your cloud journey.

What is ODF?

In case you were unfamiliar with our storage products, here’s a quick rundown of what, exactly, ODF is, and how you can get access to it. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is composed of Red Hat Ceph Storage, Rook and Multicloud Object Gateway. The solution is built on a combination of community driven software components.

Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is a cluster data management solution that provides higher level data services and persistent storage for Red Hat OpenShift. ODF provides a foundational data layer for applications to function and interact with data in a simplified, consistent and scalable manner. This also includes smart capabilities for handling of object data and disaster recovery. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation Essentials edition is included with Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus at no additional cost.

Under the hood, ODF allows for some interesting and unique workloads and capabilities that can drive reliability, speed and even cost savings into your data layers. ODF, for example, can leverage Red Hat Ceph Storage, which allows the same storage cluster to function as an object store, a block store and a file system, all at the same time. The open source nature of ODF means that it can be utilized in public clouds, or in private datacenters, alike. And you can construct your clusters out of heterogeneous, commodity equipment, or even layer it on top of your existing storage systems. And of course, everything can be encrypted both at rest, and in transit.

What’s new?

With this new release, we’ve added new features and fixes to make your life as an administrator easier. And nothing makes it easier to sleep at night, as a systems administrator, than knowing you’ve got options when it comes to disaster recovery. To that end, we’ve added regional disaster recovery, with automated protection for block volumes. This allows for the recovery of individual blocks at the local level, and recovery times are currently being measured in minutes.

That means you can now perform asynchronous disaster recovery operations if a single datacenter fails. 

We’re also releasing a new Multicloud Object Gateway functionality, as part of this release. This functionality enables data collaboration between cloud native application using S3 compatible API and legacy application using file access

For example, Legacy applications use file systems to share data sets. Cloud-native applications that use object storage can now also access this data through Multicloud Object Gateway by using the new “namespace on top of filesystem” (NS FS) functionality. 

Other new features:

• Amazon AWS gp3/gp2 support, for backing storage resourcing
  Offering customers choice for convenient options based on needs and cost considerations.
• Single Node solution, for Edge use cases and Radio Access Network (RAN) [Technology Preview]
  Provides a solution for edge use cases using a Single Node OpenShift clusters with the ability to run on a very small footprint in terms of resource consumption.
• OADP operator v1.0, OpenShift APIs for Data Protection
  To backup and restore namespaces, Customers can extend their existing data center backup solutions to applications running in OpenShift.
• UI for dedicated nodes with taints
  Assurance that OpenShift Data Foundation containers will not become unschedulable in case of node failure.
  Easily set up dedicated storage nodes.
• Console Performance card update
  More informative and intuitive information
  Ability to monitor and signal issues proactively and timely.
• Cluster wide encryption, service account for KMS authentication
  Capability to follow security best-practices by allowing for expiring access-tokens
• IBM Cloud Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Service, Hyper Protect Crypto Services KMS integration for encryption at rest.
  Ability to easily use existing facilities inside Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud & Satellite.

Foundation for the Future

We’re working on a whole slew of ways to improve ODF over the coming months and years, but for now, we’re excited to be bringing in new customers thanks to our inclusion with the Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation Essentials is included with Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus at no additional cost, providing essential data management needs. 

Upgrading to Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation Advanced is recommended for customers who want more sophisticated disaster recovery or more extensive encryption capabilities.

The very nature of open source is such that the more people are using the platform, the more ideas and innovation we can bring to it, together. With your help, ODF will continue to evolve and expand.

More Resources

• https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift-data-foundation
• https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/openshift-data-foundation-overview
• https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/platform-plus
• http://red.ht/videos-ODF 
• https://www.redhat.com/en/contact