Rancher Labs, creator of a Kubernetes management platform, has announced the general availability of Longhorn, an enterprise-grade, cloud-native container storage solution.
According to Rancher, Longhorn directly answers the need for an enterprise-grade, vendor-neutral persistent storage solution that supports the easy development of stateful applications within Kubernetes. It increases developer and ITOps efficiency by making persistent storage easy to deploy with a single click, and is 100% open source, distributed block storage built using microservices.
The GA version of Longhorn delivers enterprise storage features, including:
- Thin-provisioning, snapshots, backup, and restore
- Non-disruptive volume expansion
- Cross-cluster disaster recovery volume with defined RTO and RPO
- Live upgrade of Longhorn software without impacting running volumes
- Full-featured Kubernetes CLI integration and standalone UI
According to IDC, by 2022, 70% of enterprises will have deployed unified VMs, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud management processes and tools across all cloud and on-premise deployments.
As enterprises look to use Kubernetes to manage stateful applications (any program that captures data about each client session and uses that data the next time the client makes a request), says Rancher, they also mandate support for persistent storage to elevate these stateful applications to first-class citizens of the Kubernetes world.
“As enterprises deploy more production applications in containers, the need for persistent container storage continues to grow rapidly,” said Sheng Liang, CEO at Rancher Labs. “Longhorn fills the need for a 100% open source and easy-to-deploy enterprise-grade Kubernetes storage solution.”
Users can leverage Longhorn to create distributed block storage mirrored across local disks. Longhorn also serves as a bridge to integrate enterprise-grade storage with Kubernetes by enabling users to deploy Longhorn on existing NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel storage arrays and on cloud storage systems like AWS EBS, all the while adding useful features such as application-aware snapshots, backups, and remote replication.
Existing Rancher users can install Longhorn from Rancher’s app catalog. Longhorn is also free to download and use, and customers looking for support can purchase a premium support model with the same SLAs provided through Rancher Support Services.
For additional information, visit www.rancher.com.