Kioxia, the memory chip maker, has integrated its KumoScale flash storage array into the Kubernetes world.
KumoScale is Kioxia’s software to operate a box of flash drives and presents their capacity across an NVMe-oF link as virtual storage volumes to host server applications. The software includes thin provisioning, snapshots, clones, drive-to-drive migration, and TCP/IP and RoCE transport support.
KumoScale can now serve as a container host, providing managed NVMe volumes to storage applications such as distributed file systems and object stores running locally on KumoScale storage nodes. These capabilities and applications, along with other KumoScale control plane services, are deployed and managed via a Kubernetes “micro-cluster”.
The company has added a raft of Kubernetes-related features.
- KumoScale CSI Driver makes KumoScale volumes appear to host containers as fast local NVMe drives. The driver is available in the Cloud-native Computing Foundation repository.
- Containerised KumoScale Management Cluster control services are installed and managed by a private dedicated Kubernetes “micro-cluster” that manages dozens or hundreds of storage nodes.
- Single KumoScale cluster can simultaneously serve many client clusters, with differing control and maintaining isolation and storage quotas for each cluster.
- Policy isolation between tenants.
- KumoScale storage nodes can host container-based storage interfaces, like file and object storage services which are automatically installed and monitored by the KumoScale Management Cluster.
KumoScale can serve block, file, and object storage simultaneously to Kubernetes, OpenStack, and bare metal clients.
Kioxia NVMe-oF array difference
To date, rival all-flash array storage suppliers have integrated their arrays with Kubernetes via CSI (Container Storage Interface) plugins. They also support, or will support, NVMe-oF access. They have control plane software running in the array storage controllers.
In contrast, Kioxia KumoScale’s array has no controllers to run its control plane software. The equivalent software, KumoScale Management Cluster control services, runs as containers in a connected Kubernetes host cluster. According to Kioxia, KumoScale orchestrates storage volumes at data centre scale, like Kubernetes orchestrates containers.
Kioxia is targeting service providers and large private cloud deployments with KumoScale. A free two-week trial is on offer, hosted on Kioxia cloud infrastructure.
