Persistent Storage Providers

General Discussions
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Hi All,

Looking for some advice on Persistent Storage Providers. Currently I have been using NetApp’s Trident to deploy our drives but it was recently become a bit unreliable in terms of access and account management so I am looking for some alternatives.

Currently the top of my pile are Rook and StorageOS. Does anyone have any recommendations between the two, ease of use, flexibility, supportability/maintainability? I am a team of one maintainability is a big one for me. Both options look really nice but I haven’t had a chance to deep dive them as of yet so any input would be great.

Thanks!

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Hi macintoshprime,
You might want to have a look at this for more options & especially the stuff you have asked for:

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Thanks I will take a look. Appreciate the assist.

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Are you only looking at on-prem providers or is running in a public cloud also an option for you? Also, how mission critical are the workloads? If you are looking for low-overhead operations, I would highly recommend something with commercial support on-prem or a public cloud provider’s storage offerings. Happy to provide more input based on what our customers are doing based on what your environment and requirements are.

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Our environment at moment is using Rancher to provision/manager the clusters, we are currently only on prem and we will be expanding out to Azure over the next year or so. Currently we are using NetApp’s Trident plugin to provision NFS drives.

The workloads we are running now are not high demand but as we are slowly rolling out k8s to the rest of the department. We will be running Databases at some point in the cluster but we have not defined what and how. So having a backend that is performant and handles recovery/rollbacks easily would be great and preferably k8s native.

Sorry to be vague but we’re still a little early on in the process. If there is anything I glazed over let me know I’d be happy to elaborate.

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If you are looking for something Kubernetes-native, look into offerings from Portworx, Rook, OpenEBS, StorageOS, and Nexenta. Heard of customers in production with NetApp (which I understand isn’t working for you), EMC ScaleIO, GlusterFS, etc. too. Different pros/cons of each system and so, you are going to need a careful evaluation there based on your requirements and budget. Unfortunately, no easy answer here but maybe, given that you already have it, ping your support contacts at NetApp to see if they can address your problems?

Some of the talks from Cloud-Native Storage Day - https://www.cloudnativestorageday.com might help you as you go through the options.

Feel free to ping me if you have detailed questions about anything. Happy to help.

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Just as a heads up. Some databases really do not like having their storage backed by NFS (prometheus is the same way as well). If you’re looking for something that can cover more storage-use cases it really needs to be able to serve up block devices.

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Thanks @mrbobbytables. That’s one of the reason why I’m looking at adding another solution to the mix. Having just NFS capabilities seems rather limiting.

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Awesome! Thanks for the link @ntolia . I will have to lock myself in a room one of these days and watch those and do some more research. So far from some light reading, Rook, StorageOS are at the top of my list, Portworx seems to be getting a lot of attention these days as well.