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OpenShift Data Foundation delivers a persistent data foundation that is integrated with, and optimized for, OpenShift Container Platform. OpenShift Data Foundation provides file, block, and object storage classes that enable workloads for data at rest (such as databases and warehouses), data in motion, automated data pipelines, and data in action.
OpenShift Data Foundation also provides services for continuous deployment models, analytics, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Deployed, consumed, and managed through the OpenShift administrator console, the OpenShift Data Foundation platform is built on Red Hat Ceph storage, offering tightly integrated, persistent data services for OpenShift and hybrid and multicloud environments.
Cloud providers and system providers can offer storage for diverse workloads. Often, these storage layers are delivered using different storage interface technologies, depending on the storage protocol that is addressed by an application. These storage solutions lack a service-level interface that provides a consistent experience for users regardless of the underlying storage infrastructure. OpenShift Data Foundation provides the following data services for applications in Kubernetes that support multiple workload types across multiple cloud platforms:
Earlier releases of OpenShift Data Foundation were focused on a fully containerized Ceph cluster that is run with an OpenShift Container Platform cluster, optimized as necessary to provide block, file, or object storage with standard 3x replication. While this approach made it easy to deploy a fully integrated Ceph cluster within an OpenShift environment, it presented the following limitations:
OpenShift Data Foundation overcomes these issues in external mode by allowing OpenShift Container Platform to access a separate and independent Ceph storage cluster, as shown in the following figure.
Figure 9. OpenShift Data Foundation accessing an external Ceph storage cluster
Alongside traditional internal-mode storage, this option gives solution architects multiple deployment options to address their specific workload needs. These options preserve a common, consistent storage services interface to applications and workloads while providing distinct benefits, as follows:
The PowerEdge R7525 server is optimized for storage and provides an ideal combination of performance and flexibility for software-defined storage applications. The server can accommodate various storage device configurations including 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state drives (SSDs), and nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) devices. See OpenShift Data Foundation data node PowerEdge R7525 BOM.