Storage for containers refers to a storage infrastructure built for containerisation platforms to improve container utilisation and management. Containers are now used extensively as more and more organisations are modernising and shifting their IT environments to the cloud.
Containerisation also enables businesses to gain greater agility as well as speed and ease of application development and deployment. For instance, the use of containers means portability of applications, as it can easily be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Traditional and legacy applications can also be modernised and become cloud-enabled through containerisation.
Just like many areas of IT, storage is an important aspect of containers. However, traditional methods of shared storage that were based on connecting physical servers to physical storage are inefficient when dealing with containerised and modern applications that are more transient in nature. For instance, a container can be created in mere seconds and terminated just as quickly when it is no longer required with minimal use of system resources. That is the power of containers but this also requires businesses to rethink their storage methods (such as with the use of persistent storage) to maximise the benefits.
Due to these reasons, businesses will need modern and secured storage infrastructure that delivers enterprise reliability, data management efficiency and cloud-native agility as they embark on a container and cloud journey. Having container-enabled enterprise storage enhances the capabilities of containerisation and can help you improve the speed and productivity among your containerised workloads.
An example of this would be IBM Storage for Red Hat OpenShift, which is able to unify traditional and container workloads to ensure agility, seamless cloud integration and provide data resiliency. It also allows organisations to leverage persistent storage and data services, along with modern data protection capabilities, in their container implementations. IBM’s storage for containers provides the infrastructure foundation and storage orchestration for a full-platform, on-premises, hybrid multi-cloud environment that supports Container Storage Interface (CSI).
IBM is extending innovation in cross-platform data needed for enterprises to fully adopt containers, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift as the standard across physical, virtual and cloud platforms. Among the biggest innovations that IBM has introduced to the containerisation space has been the IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks. It is designed to provide flexibility for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) teams who often need to file, object and block as software-defined storage on OpenShift.
As for those seeking support in their existing infrastructure, IBM’s FlashSystem storage portfolio provides the kind of low latency, high-performance and high-availability storage they need for physical, virtual or container workloads with broad CSI support. This includes Ansible scripts for rapid deployment, enhanced support for storage-class memory and improvements in snapshot and data efficiency.
Additionally, to address the gaps that still exist within traditional IT platforms and concerns about the rapid evolution of open-source projects, IBM also offers the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, its industry-leading modern data protection solution to protect Red Hat OpenShift environments. In this way, IBM Storage helps organisations as they work to protect their business and accelerate innovation.
Click here to learn more about the importance of keeping your storage up to speed as you modernise your applications for the hybrid multi-cloud era.
