As organizations work to modernize apps that may live on-premises or in the cloud, the simplicity of HCI coupled with hybrid cloud’s flexibility can seem like a clear path forward. However, an organization may still need to contend with some of the complexity and infrastructure management challenges that accompany Kubernetes.
At Cloud Field Day 8, Diamanti showcased its platform, a hardware and software solution focused on helping organizations implement an enterprise-ready Kubernetes or OpenShift platform for Hybrid Cloud.
The Appeal of HCI and Hybrid Cloud
Despite the apparent popularity of Kubernetes, the truth is many organizations still run legacy applications on-premises. The quest to modernize their apps and infrastructure is a real struggle. When it’s time for a hardware refresh, organizations often look to HCI solutions to promise simplicity and the ability to extend their on-premises datacenters to the public cloud. Hybrid cloud with HCI becomes an even more appealing option when bundled with software that helps organizations consume Kubernetes more easily.
Diamanti Platform Takes the Secure Full Stack Approach to Kubernetes
Diamanti claims that focusing on hardware and software enables the secure full-stack approach and is a vital part of its competitive advantage.
For the HCI portion of its platform, Diamanti partnered with OEM vendors such as Dell and Lenovo to leverage its Ultima software as a Kubernetes data plane. It coupled proprietary smart PCIe cards for offloading I/O and managing storage and other functionality, including network and storage virtualization. Diamanti also introduced a hardware appliance for an easily deployed, turnkey solution that deploys bare-metal Kubernetes. With close hardware and software integration, Diamanti can drive greater performance while simultaneously responding to customer needs more rapidly.
Bringing Federation to Kubernetes Clusters
Another critical component of the Diamanti Platform is Spektra. Spektra, now at version 3.0, is designed to bring federation to Kubernetes clusters with stateful applications. By unifying the infrastructure, cluster, and app management across multiple Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift Clusters hosted on-premises and the cloud, Spektra can bring operational simplicity and efficiency to organizations.
To identify management, multi-tenancy is a vital part of any federated solution. Spektra provides multi-tenancy in a domain and tenant architecture suitable for enterprises or Managed Service Providers (MSPs). This multi-tenancy support extends to a Single Pane of Glass for management ease.
Spektra supports hybrid cloud flexibility by allowing operators to migrate containers from on-premises to public cloud. Cross-cluster replication enables Kubernetes clusters to support business continuity and disaster recovery. Enterprise storage features such as allocate on write snapshots can do linked clones for testing and development.
Conclusion
The shift to container-based workloads and the rise of public cloud might lead you to believe that hardware has been relegated to a less critical role in IT. However, many workloads will stay on-premises for the foreseeable future for a myriad of reasons.
Hybrid cloud and HCI can give organizations a path toward modernizing applications wherever they reside while delivering operational efficiency and simplicity. Increasingly, we see robust solutions arise from vendors who couple software and hardware together into one platform. With its HCI offerings and software solutions, Diamanti has taken a full-stack approach to designing a platform for enterprise-ready Kubernetes for hybrid cloud.
