DEVOPSdigest

VAST Data announced the general availability of its new Container Storage Interface (CSI).

VAST Data’s CSI enables users to programmatically deploy and manage storage services for a variety of container platforms that have adopted the CSI standard. Announced in February of 2019, VAST Data’s Universal Storage architecture has combined new technology such as QLC flash, 3D Xpoint and NVMe over Fabrics networking with new VAST algorithms to transform the economics of flash and make it finally affordable to put all of your data on flash. VAST’s CSI driver works with modern container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and Red Hat Open Shift to enable the programmatic provisioning of persistent storage volumes.

Beyond the benefits of all-flash, containerized applications can also benefit from the advanced capabilities that are inherent to VAST Data’s Disaggregated, Shared Everything (DASE) storage architecture:

- RDMA-accelerated persistent volumes: VAST’s NFSoRDMA interface can stream data into single containers at nearly 9GB/s, a level of performance which is essential for next-generation machine learning and deep learning applications and 4x the speed of legacy NAS. In recent customer testing, VAST’s CSI driver and Universal Storage delivered three times the performance of even an enterprise all-flash SAN storage system

- Quality of service for multiple tenants: With the ability to pool VAST Servers into resource groups that can be dynamically allocated to container pods, Universal Storage can ensure that specific applications do not get overrun by other applications in an environment by hard-allocating file server HW along pool boundaries.

“We are continuing our march toward being a truly universal storage platform by bringing VAST to container environments,” said Jeff Denworth, VP of Products and Co-Founder at VAST. “With our CSI, we are drastically improving the performance of NFS-backed persistent volumes through the implementation of storage CPU pooling and RDMA, which makes this ideal for companies using containers for today’s demanding artificial intelligence workloads. We can now enable enterprises to bring all-flash performance and capacity at the price of HDD to container platforms that have adopted the CSI standards.”

The VAST Data CSI driver is available today.