Storage
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We are excited to announce that we have extended NetApp® AstraTM Control to support on- premises data centers. This new version of Astra Control, called Astra Control Center, will be available as self-managed software installed on premises. Astra Control Center augments the currently available Astra Control Service, a fully managed service that supports Azure AKS and Google GKE clouds.
Our customers using the Astra Control Service expressed interest in a version of the Kubernetes data management platform that they can install on premises to manage their private clouds. Astra Control Center delivers on that need.
Whether you are developing and deploying new software services using cloud-native technologies in the cloud or on premises, Astra Control will simplify your Kubernetes data management operations. Now you have the choice to use Astra Control Service, a fully managed cloud service operated by NetApp for the public cloud or to run Astra Control Center software for your on-premises data centers.
Astra Control: Application data management for cloud-native applications.
In a world that is increasingly hybrid, to manage your Kubernetes data-rich workload you need a solution that abstracts away the infrastructure complexities and delivers a consistent solution across your deployments in private and public clouds.
This solution is achieved through:
- Consistent persistent storage services across cloud and on premises
- Identical data protection capabilities wherever their application runs
- Common APIs to automate operations across cloud and on-premises infrastructure
You want the choice to deploy Astra Control as a fully managed service or as software installed on premises. This choice allows you to run your applications on premises or in the cloud. Simply put, you can choose the Astra Control deployment model that gives you the freedom to innovate in either your cloud or on your premises.
Astra Control delivers a rich set of consistent data management functionality and API access for application-aware Kubernetes data management in Google, Azure, and on- premises NetApp ONTAP® software.
Positioning Astra Control Service and Astra Control Center.
Consistent persistent storage services
Astra Control leverages the ubiquity of NetApp’s industry-leading ONTAP storage platform. Kubernetes applications can dynamically allocate and consume a persistent storage volume from an ONTAP storage platform no matter where they are running.
- For on premises, ONTAP shared storage services are served from AFF, FAS, FlexPod®, and Select form factors.
- For cloud, Cloud Volumes Service for Google and Azure NetApp Files offer the same shared storage services native to their respective cloud platforms.
For data-rich applications, this means that once their applications are developed and tested against an ONTAP storage platform, the apps can run in hybrid cloud environments without any need for retooling or revalidation of storage layer semantics. Astra Control uses NetApp Trident, a Container Storage Interface (CSI), for integrating various ONTAP storage platforms available across cloud and on-premises deployments.
Astra Control allows you to import volumes that are currently provisioned on an ONTAP storage platform, which means that existing applications running on Kubernetes clusters can be brought under Astra Control without any disruptions.
Identical data protection capabilities
It’s a common practice to run multiple namespaces in a Kubernetes cluster, as well as multiple Kubernetes clusters across data centers and regions in a cloud. As your application needs change, you may want to move your applications to meet the capacity and performance needs of their users. Astra Control addresses this need by offering consistent data protection operations across your Kubernetes deployments.
Astra Control takes a wholistic application-centric data protection approach. This approach includes the data protection for persistent volumes consumed by an application and also the Kubernetes resources (pods, secrets, configmaps, and so on), and other manifests that are associated with it. This wholistic view of Kubernetes applications and associated data movers is what powers Astra Control to deliver complete application protection, recovery, cloning, and migration capabilities.
Astra Control adapts to using the appropriate storage service interfaces on premises or cloud- native object storage to deliver data protection capabilities. It enables you to deploy and manage applications without any cloud connectivity, if the deployment warrants such a configuration.
Common API for automation
A key requirement for application portability is API accessibility to the services it depends on wherever the application runs. This accessibility allows you to abstract the underlying infrastructure from applications and helps build service automation.
As a provider of Kubernetes data management services to applications, Astra Control provides a consistent API across its fully managed (Astra Control Service) and self-managed (Astra Control Center) offerings. You can integrate Astra Control into your applications to deliver consistent data protection capabilities regardless of whether the application runs on premises or on cloud.
Build your own solution
We understand that you want to develop custom application stacks to serve your customers. To simplify integrating Astra Control’s Kubernetes data management services, we deliver easy-to-use toolkits in Python.
What’s next?
We are actively expanding the capabilities of end-to-end data management in the Astra portfolio.
Visit the Astra Control product page for more information, and get started with the Astra Control free trial today.