NetApp Astra Control now deployable as on-premises software

Written by Gunna Marripudi, Senior Director, Astra Product Management | Aug 5, 2021 5:24:39 PM

Managing your on-premises data-hungry Kubernetes applications just became easier. We are excited to announce the general availability of NetApp® Astra™ Control, now deployable as on-premises software for NetApp ONTAP® customers. This version of Astra Control, called Astra Control Center, extends the rich enterprise-class data management capabilities of ONTAP to Kubernetes applications.

Using Astra Control, you can:

Dynamically provision volumes on ONTAP systems.
Automatically discover and protect applications and their associated data.
Migrate applications and data across Kubernetes clusters in your data centers.

Additionally, you can automate your Kubernetes application data management operations at scale with API calls.

The following figure shows how a single instance of on-premises Astra Control Center deployment can support several Kubernetes clusters.

Astra Control Center showing namespaces, clusters, and ONTAP.

If your Kubernetes clusters are already using ONTAP systems for their storage, you can start using Astra Control Center to protect or migrate your Kubernetes applications with no operational disruption.

If you have added a new Kubernetes cluster to your data center, you can register the cluster with Astra Control Center to manage applications’ data and metadata protection.

You can seamlessly grow your Kubernetes cluster compute and data resources without impacting application protection that is already configured with Astra Control Center.

With this announcement, Astra Control Center adds the following new capabilities to simplify managing your on-premises Kubernetes application data management.

ONTAP storage provider integration. Astra Control Center gives you a bird’s eye view of ONTAP storage systems in use by Kubernetes clusters and the health of the storage systems. This information helps you to monitor the health of Kubernetes applications and any issues with data volumes.
High-level metrics. Astra Control Center includes high-level capacity and performance metrics for each of the ONTAP storage systems used by the Kubernetes application clusters. It also provides a mapping of data volumes on ONTAP systems to Kubernetes clusters and applications that are using them. At a finer granular persistent volume level, it shows the current usage in capacity against the allocated volume size. You will find such information very useful as you plan for workload placement as well as for resource growth.
NetApp Cloud Insights integration. Astra Control Center gives you access to local and remote observability. Using Cloud Insights, you can leverage the power of analytics based on the telemetry data to help you with proactive management of the compute and data infrastructure serving your Kubernetes applications.
Bring your own bucket. To help you prepare for any unforeseen disaster recovery scenarios, Astra Control allows you to use an ONTAP S3 or StorageGrid S3 bucket to store complete application and data backups. You can register one or more S3 buckets, as required by your applications or users, to manage disaster recovery requirements.

Astra Control Center showing ONTAP storage integration.

In summary, Astra Control offers a holistic view and control over Kubernetes application data infrastructure and simplifies your Kubernetes operations. It delivers the same benefits to both your on-premises and cloud-hosted Kubernetes applications.

In an early access program of Astra Control Center, we had the benefit of the participation of large telco, finance, retail, and federal enterprises. We are grateful for their valuable input, which helped us to ensure that Astra Control Center solves a real need for Kubernetes data management.

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