The next phase of object evolution: VMware, containers, and Kubernetes
Many customers are looking to deploy object storage to support cloud-native apps without procuring and managing additional storage systems. This is why we have partnered with our colleagues at VMware to connect our leading object storage technology1 with VMware Cloud Foundation™ with VMware Tanzu™, to truly deliver a cloud operating model at scale. We are excited to announce the launch of ObjectScale Early Access* for select Dell Technologies customers.
VMware is taking the application and infrastructure modernization space by storm. With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu back in April, VMware has achieved the optimum environment for running modern applications within the enterprise. At the core of VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu are the latest innovations in VMware vSphere® and VMware vSAN™ which drive collaboration between development and IT operations.
The integration of Kubernetes into vSphere empowers data center operators to manage both virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters within a unified experience, on the same familiar platform they know and love. With an open ecosystem of Kubernetes-based APIs, developers can easily provision infrastructure services on-demand. The introduction of VMware vSAN Data Persistence platform, which is integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu, allows customers to provision persistent cloud-scale object storage for modern stateful applications. Data center operators can also extend Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) from VM volumes to container volumes, allowing for a consistent storage management approach for traditional and cloud-native applications including services such as object stores that they depend on.
Introducing ObjectScale
Building on our industry leadership position, we have engineered our object storage platform to take advantage of Kubernetes’ native automated deployment, scaling and management capabilities. This next generation of object storage software will be lighter, faster and deployable on existing ESXi-virtualized infrastructure, all manageable from within the vSphere UI. With rich S3 compatibility and self-service APIs, developers can quickly spin up object storage containers to fuel everything from big data and analytics applications to ephemeral dev/test sandboxes.
Using ObjectScale, any organization can deliver scalable cloud services with the reliability and control of a private cloud infrastructure. ObjectScale enables IT to easily manage globally distributed storage infrastructure under a single namespace with anywhere access to content. It’s also architected with certain design principles, such as a global namespace with eventual consistency, scale-out capabilities, secure multi-tenancy and superior performance for both small and large objects. The platform was built as a completely distributed system following the microservices principle of cloud applications. ObjectScale has a layered architecture, with every function in the system built as an independent layer, making them horizontally scalable across all nodes and enabling high availability. The S3-compatible ObjectScale software, running on VMware nodes with vSAN, forms the underlying cloud storage service, providing protection, geo-replication and data access.
Enterprise object anywhere
ObjectScale will help enterprise organizations embrace microservices and agile CI/CD processes, but it will also enable object storage to be deployed anywhere VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu is running, whether in a core data center, at an edge location or even in the cloud. This gives organizations the power to put data close to the applications they support, reducing latency and improving the user experience. In addition, object storage from disparate platforms will be able to cross-replicate for greater access, reliability and redundancy.
What’s next?
This exciting new phase of object storage evolution is only the beginning for VMware and Dell Technologies. There is a reason VMware is a critical partner for ObjectScale, as our close partnership will help organizations everywhere bring new products to market faster and drive innovation across all areas of the business.
“VMware and Dell Technologies are working together to accelerate cloud-native application development across the hybrid cloud”, said Lee Caswell, VP Marketing, CPBU, VMware. “ObjectScale on VMware Cloud Foundation is an important, new part of our cloud native toolset that transforms traditional IT from a cost center to a center of innovation and value.”
ObjectScale Early Access will soon be available to enterprise customers in beta on VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu and we encourage you to check out our sessions at VMworld 2020 to learn about what we are doing on the object storage front. We’ve got a lot of innovative functionality on the roadmap and can’t wait to share more. Stay tuned.
In case you missed it
We have been very active here at Dell Technologies the past few months including the launch of PowerScale, the next evolution of scale-out NAS from the industry’s external storage leader2 and DataIQ, our flagship dataset management software. These new products help enterprise organizations store data at scale and take control of their entire unstructured data environment.
*The Early Access release is a pre-general availability beta program for organizations to test the ObjectScale code base in a non-production environment.
1 Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage” by Julia Palmer, Raj Bala, Chandra Mukhyala, September 30, 2019
2 IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 2019Q4, March 12, 2020 – Vendor Revenue
