DataCore has announced Bolt, cloud-native storage for containers that supports block access using NVMe-over-Fabrics/TCP.
Bolt is based on OpenEBS, hyperconverged, container-attached, block storage software for the Kubernetes market that was developed by startup MayaData, which DataCore bought in November. Intel said OpenEBS’s Mayastor engine was the fastest open-source storage for Kubernetes in March last year. NVMe/TCP uses everyday datacenter Ethernet and doesn’t need the more expensive lossless Ethernet setup used by RoCE, while being almost as fast.
DataCore CEO Dave Zabrowski said: “Early on we recognized that containers were going to be a once-in-a-generation transformation, where data storage has a singular impact on the deployment and responsiveness of microservice-based applications. This is a market where modern storage technologies such as NVMe over Fabrics and platform-independent data services are in strong demand.”
According to DataCore, Bolt’s containerized microservices stack exploits the low-latency and high IOPS characteristics of NVMe/TCP and NVMe SSDs along with Kubernetes’ intrinsic orchestration and resilience at scale. It supports a composable and disaggregated storage architecture removing the overhead and sluggishness experienced with other storage products.
DataCore argues that traditional storage infrastructures like external arrays have a dependency on repetitive manual tasks. This slows down the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines seen in DevOps, and reduces the advantages that containerization can bring.
It claims Bolt eliminates stage-related delays and allows DevOps to:
- Accelerate responsiveness of stateful workloads through low-latency access to NVMe drives
- Streamline DevOps CI/CD pipeline with containerized storage services orchestrated directly from Kubernetes
- Replace complex storage management with native Kubernetes automation
- Gain observability to storage behavior not possible with external systems
- Ensure portability of storage services by removing kernel/OS dependencies
- Enhance data resilience through volume replication across K8s nodes
DataCore is well known for its SANsymphony software-defined block storage and has a file system product called vFiLO. It entered the object storage market in 2021 by buying Caringo.
Now Datacore can provide external or hyperconverged infrastructure appliance block storage, file storage, object storage, and cloud-native block storage.
Bolt is available for commercial use and is licensed per Kubernetes node. A typical one-year term of Bolt includes the annual license cost and support fees. Read a two-page Solution Brief here.
