Embracing hybrid cloud often means implementing solutions that allow organizations to run not only containers on-premises but also object storage, too. At its recent Storage Field Day appearance, MinIO showcased its cloud-native object storage platform and showed how MinIO is not only a good fit for DevOps teams but also enterprises using object storage. MinIO’s object storage platform comes to vSphere Tanzu, gets a user interface, and more. These updates come with many benefits and make object storage more easily consumable and manageable to enterprises.
Where Cloud-Native and Enterprise Workloads Converge
Containers or Virtual Machines? Cloud-Native or Enterprise? While these environments might seem at odds, the truth is these worlds continue to converge. Watch any Tech Field Day presentation, and you’ll find solutions like OpenShift and VMware Tanzu cropping up to solve some of the management and complexity problems that often accompany Kubernetes and Hybrid Cloud deployments.
For a myriad of reasons like cost and security, many organizations have embraced hybrid cloud deployments. Embracing hybrid cloud often means adopting solutions that allow organizations to run not only containers on-premises but object storage, too.
Bringing Cloud-Native Object Storage to vSphere with Tanzu
During their Storage Field Day presentation, MinIO showcased its cloud-native, software-defined object storage platform and showed how MinIO is not only a good fit for DevOps teams but also enterprise customers. Launched five years ago, MinIO created high-performance Kubernetes-native object storage for hybrid or private cloud environments. MinIO designed its platform to be performant primary storage.
MinIO can be deployed as a web server on one of the three major Linux distributions with a 50 MB binary. The lightweight packaging of MinIO has made it an ideal deployment for edge use cases. For multi-tenant support, though, MinIO recommends deploying their platform as an operator inside a Kubernetes cluster. Thanks to a recent collaboration with VMware, there is now another way for organizations to add MinIO into their environment.
vSphere with Tanzu (vSphere 7 Update 1), in addition to Kubernetes support, now includes MinIO object storage as part of its VSAN Data Persistence Platform. In vSphere, MinIO will run close to the ESXi kernel on the supervisor cluster. MinIO codebase for this vSphere implementation is unchanged; it’s the same cloud-native MinIO that is easy for ITOps teams to deploy and manage. In vSphere with Tanzu, MinIO runs as a plug-in. All MinIO object-store options like configuring an identity provider, enabling TLS, and configuring encryption for data at rest are managed through the vSphere plug-in.
Enabling Infrastructure Teams to Manage MinIO thru a GUI and Subscription Network
Additionally, MinIO added MinIO Console, a graphical user interface to manage MinIO clusters. Because of MinIO’s cloud-native roots, it built an API first, then CLI, and now a user interface. By adding a user interface, MinIO becomes more accessible and easily manageable by infrastructure teams that often work with user interfaces.
MinIO is 100% open source and offers two licensing models, Apache v2 and Affero General Public License (AGPLv3). Last year, MinIO launched SUBNET, its subscription network and support service for its object storage platform. With SUBNET, customers gain direct access to support engineers but also can obtain a commercial license. Additionally, SUBNET offers health metrics and collects cluster health telemetry via phone-home service. SUBNET is billed on a monthly consumption basis and provides three levels of support (free, standard, and enterprise).
Conclusion
Many commercial solutions like PortWorx or Veeam’s Kasten leverage MinIO’s object storage platform under the covers. Additionally, at MinIO’s own admission, DevOps teams have brought MinIO into enterprises – “shadow” IT-style. MinIO wants to make its platform more easily manageable and consumable for these IT teams through its integration with vSphere with Tanzu, its SUBNET subscription service, and its newly added user interface.
To learn more about MinIO and its object storage platform, tune into to the rest of MinIO’s Storage Field Day presentation.
