In an era where agility, scalability, and resilience define the success of a business, organizations are moving toward Kubernetes. They’re on a continuous journey to either rearchitect their applications by using containers running on Kubernetes or re-platform their existing VM-based applications to a modern virtualization solution that’s built on top of Kubernetes. As cloud-native adoption soars, so does the need for a robust, enterprise-grade data protection solution that keeps up with the demands of this modern infrastructure.
And NetApp has that solution. Today, we are excited to announce the preview of NetApp® Backup and Recovery for Kubernetes-based containers and VMs. This new integration brings seamless, unified protection for applications that run on NetApp storage. At the same time, it delivers features that are critical for users who are responsible for deploying and managing the modern applications that run inside their organization.
Why add Kubernetes support to NetApp Backup and Recovery?
NetApp already offers Kubernetes-native data protection features as part of NetApp Trident™ software, which were announced last November at KubeCon North America. These features rely on open-source data movers like Restic and Kopia for data protection operations. Although this protection is good enough for some customers, we believe that integrating more closely with the NetApp SnapMirror® feature unlocks a new set of benefits for our customers.
By adding Kubernetes support into Backup and Recovery, NetApp offers a unified data protection service that uses SnapMirror to intelligently handle all the data movement operations for faster backups and restores of modern applications. This integration builds on the strong foundation of Trident and Trident protect. But instead of relying on open-source components like Restic and Kopia, it relies on NetApp SnapMirror replication technology, which has been on the market for 25+ years!
SaaS-based unified control plane for multicluster management
With Backup and Recovery, customers can connect multiple Kubernetes clusters that are spread across one or more data center environments to a unified control plane, hosted by NetApp.
For this preview release, customers can easily discover their Kubernetes clusters, backed by NetApp ONTAP® storage, to Backup and Recovery. The cluster discovery process is now simpler than with other solutions, which ask users to generate kubeconfig files and to manually upload them to backup solution. Instead, users can generate custom commands to not just connect and authenticate their Kubernetes cluster to Backup and Recovery, but also to install and to configure Trident protect on their Kubernetes clusters. This approach avoids the scenario of expiring kubeconfig files, which adds friction and can lead to failing backups and missed SLAs.
Intelligent storage integration for Kubernetes data protection
With Backup and Recovery, NetApp customers can benefit from the tighter integration with SnapMirror. For example, NetApp SnapMirror integration means that all backups after the first full backup are incremental forever, with increments calculated at the 4K block level. Because the backups and restores take less time, it translates to lower recovery point and recovery time objectives, enabling customers to meet their SLA targets.
To help customers reduce their storage footprint on their primary storage, NetApp enables features like compression, deduplication, and compaction. With Backup and Recovery, customers get to preserve these efficiency benefits when taking backups to object storage buckets. Instead of inflating the data and trying to deduplicate it again, Backup and Recovery relies on SnapMirror to move only the blocks that are needed. By using this approach, customers reduce the storage footprint of their backup target, in turn helping them lower the TCO of the overall solution.
With Kubernetes support in Backup and Recovery, customers can also offload the data movement operations for backup jobs to the storage layer. This capability is a huge differentiator when compared with backup tools that rely on open-source data movers like Restic and Kopia. Tools that rely on Restic or Kopia for backups must spin up pods on their Kubernetes cluster. These pods are responsible for data movement to the object storage buckets, which leads to increased compute (CPU and memory) utilization on the Kubernetes cluster for backup jobs. For larger deployments, it can also require dedicated compute nodes in a Kubernetes cluster to run backup pods, which takes away resources that should ideally be used for running revenue-generating applications. Backup and Recovery can help overcome this challenge by offloading all data movement operations to the storage layer. When a backup is triggered from inside the Kubernetes cluster, Trident protect running on the Kubernetes cluster calls the necessary storage APIs on the ONTAP layer to create a backup and to move it to an object storage bucket. Because all this data movement is handled at the storage layer, customers can use their entire compute footprint for revenue-generating applications, rather than for data protection pods.
Support for Kubernetes features
In addition to all the storage layer benefits, Backup and Recovery builds on the strong foundation of Trident. Even during the preview, customers can customize their application definitions to include resources across namespaces and resource types and filter them by using label selectors. Customers also have the option to add any cluster-scoped resources that they need to protect as part of their application.
Backup and Recovery supports protection of both containers and VMs running on Kubernetes, including OpenShift Virtualization VMs. Backup and Recovery also includes support for application-consistent backups by using execution hooks and templates so that users can execute scripts against their pods and VMs to freeze and to thaw the applications as necessary. And because customers can back up and restore applications on the same Kubernetes cluster or across Kubernetes clusters, they can move their applications across sites if they need to.
Policy-based protection
Backup and Recovery enables users to create policies that are dedicated to Kubernetes clusters. These policies, after they have been defined in the SaaS control plane, can be used to protect applications that are running across one or more Kubernetes clusters. Each policy definition allows an administrator to define a backup architecture that, in preview, supports local snapshots or object storage backups. And more architectures, like 3-2-1 protection, will be supported in a future release.
With object storage backups, administrators can define schedules and independent retention settings for each phase of the protection policy, while also being able to select a different object storage bucket to store Kubernetes metadata.
Try Backup and Recovery today
With this preview support, NetApp customers can try out the service for free. Sign up today! Complete this form to gain access to the preview program. Upon completing the form, you'll gain access to the service and can start exploring its features and providing feedback within 48-72 hours.
To find out more, check out the NetApp Backup and Recovery overview. To get started, follow the simple steps in the documentation.
Have any questions? Contact us!
Bhavin Shah, Bhavin.Shah@netapp.com
