Kasten and Pure Storage: Raising the Bar for Kubernetes Backup and Mobility

This blog was co-authored with Jon Owings, Pure Storage. 

The results of some alliances are so beneficial that you wonder why the alliance didn’t exist earlier. The partnership we are announcing today between Pure Storage™ and Kasten falls into this category. Enterprises across the world are actively working to not only build cloud native applications, but also to roll out critical Day 2 services, such as Kubernetes application backup and mobility that traditional solutions don’t support. With Pure Storage’s unique all-flash systems coupled with Kasten’s innovative K10 software, your enterprise operations teams now have a Kubernetes solution for flexible storage, backup, and mobility with unparalleled performance and operational simplicity.

Pure Storage created the FlashArray™ to provide highly available and easy to use all-flash storage for enterprises to streamline and simplify the way you use VDI and VMs. Pure then created the FlashBlade™ to provide unprecedented speed and scale with the same simplicity for unstructured workloads, both file and object. Now that Kubernetes is redefining the way structured and unstructured data is created, processed and stored, a new software abstraction is needed to manage the storage from Kubernetes. Pure Service Orchestrator™ equips  you with effortless, self-managed storage with public cloud agility on-premises and backed by all-flash speed and enterprise reliability. 

The Kasten K10 data management software platform has been purpose-built for Kubernetes. K10’s application-centric approach and deep integrations with relational and NoSQL databases, storage systems, and Kubernetes distributions provide for backup/restore and mobility of your entire Kubernetes application. K10, with operational simplicity as a core tenet, makes Kubernetes backup as easy as 1-2-3.

Kubernetes Backup and Mobility Challenges

Supporting Kubernetes backup and application mobility at scale is a critical need for production clusters. Some of the key considerations that your enterprise ops teams need to tackle when addressing these key Day 2 operational and regulatory requirements are:

• Seamless operations and policies across on-premises and clouds
  • Not all applications are created equal in terms of their backup, retention, and data residency needs. However, there is a need to have operational simplicity for storage and data management policies that can span across deployment environments. 
• Need to protect applications, not the VM/server
  • One of the big deployment changes for containerized applications (when compared with virtualized applications, for example) is that there is no mapping of applications to nodes (a VM or a server). Traditional data management systems that operate at the server or VM level fail as they were never designed to operate in this dynamic environment where applications are composed of multiple microservices and SQL/NoSQL databases.
• Enterprise security capabilities right off the bat
  • It is not negotiable in today’s environment to have support for security capabilities such as RBAC, air-gapped installs, encryption at rest and in motion for storage, backup and application mobility solutions. These need to be battle-hardened and rolled out the day the clusters are productionized. 

Benefits of Kasten and Pure Storage

The Pure Storage and Kasten alliance tackles all the challenges highlighted above in a very elegant fashion with the following approach. 

• Provide freedom of choice. The solution allows you to choose from a wide selection of FlashArray and FlashBlade systems, Kubernetes distributions, SQL and NoSQL databases as well as on-premises and cloud locations. Pure Service Orchestrator (PSO) provides federated storage pool with transparent and seamless multi-array scaling, automated storage delivery, and on demand access to block and file storage. Coupled with Kasten’s K10 Data Management Platform, this approach allows application portability without any development or application code changes. 
• Treat the application as the operational unit. This approach balances the needs of operations and development teams in cloud-native environments. Given the application focus of not just these groups but also the Kubernetes design philosophy, Kasten’s data management solution works with an entire application and not just the infrastructure or storage layers. This allows your operations team to scale by ensuring business policy compliance at the application level instead of having to think about the hundreds of components that make up a modern app. At the same time, working with the application gives your developers power and control when needed without slowing them down.
• Security and automation are at the heart of the design. A production-ready data management solution needs to deliver robust operations-specific features, including everything from global visibility, monitoring, alerting, and auditing, to features such as compliance, RBAC, and deep data service integration. Further, it means having these features work at scale, not just across diverse environments, but also with PBs of data to optimize and deduplicate. Policy-driven automation capabilities let you set up custom and default policies to meet both your container storage and data management needs. The policies provide automated enforcement to help meet your SLA’s across thousands of applications.

The solution brings together the best of container storage from Pure Storage and cloud-native data management from Kasten. Enterprises can accelerate the production of Kubernetes applications. If you are a Pure Storage customer with Kubernetes applications, this solution can now enable use cases such as:

• Easy backup/restore for your entire application stack to make it easy to “reset” your application to a good known state
• Fast cloning to a different namespace within your cluster for debugging
• Disaster recovery of your applications in another cluster, region, or cloud

How Does this Work?

Let’s dive deeper into the architecture behind the Pure Storage and Kasten solution that provides the benefits outlined above. This assumes Pure Service Orchestrator has been installed in your Kubernetes environment.

1. Orchestrator APIs: K10 installs on your Kubernetes cluster in minutes. AWS IAM integration is baked in, further reducing the attack surface. K10’s Auto-Application Discovery capability automatically scans the Kubernetes environment and discovers all applications and associated artifacts that may require protection across storage and application layers.
2. Infrastructure APIs: K10 integrates with the Pure Service Orchestrator to perform data management lifecycle operations at scale with automation policies. These enable the following capabilities:
   1. Hybrid mobility and protection
   2. Rapid Restore with FlashBlade
   3. Efficient replication and high availability
3. Application Framework: K10 provides extensible, agentless application-centric blueprints that enable backup & restore with:
   1. Desired consistency level
   2. Desired granularity
   3. Open source framework for hooks and custom extensions

You can watch a demonstration of Kasten with Pure Storage by clicking on this demo video.

Get Started Today!

We hope this blog post highlights why we’re so excited about this alliance. You can gain immediate benefits from this solution by leveraging your Pure Storage FlashArray and FlashBlade systems to seamlessly operate and protect your Kubernetes applications. Kasten’s innovative K10 software not only provides application-centric backups but allows you to  migrate and restore the application components you want, and where you want them, in the blink of an eye. 

Try the fully-featured and free Edition of K10 today with this super-quick install in <10 minutes (no, we are not exaggerating!)

You can also learn more about:

• K10 by visiting the Kasten product page and reading the K10 datasheet and docs
• Pure Storage Orchestrator by visiting the Pure Storage containers page and installation notes

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