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With the Kubernetes 1.13 release in 2019, the Container Storage Interface (CSI) became generally available. The CSI specification standardizes persistent storage management (block or file) within a container orchestrator. The advantage of the CSI specification over an “in-tree” driver is that driver development became independent of Kubernetes releases, which gives more flexibility and agility to the driver road map.
The CSI specification covers many aspects of storage management, including volumes provisioning and decommission, snapshot management, volume health metrics, permissions on the file system, and more. Nonetheless, there are still plenty of PowerMax data services that have yet to be translated in the CSI specification. To benefit from these additional features, Dell developed Container Storage Modules (CSM).
The CSM components generally come as additional sidecar containers to the CSI PowerMax driver or extra containers to be instantiated on the same cluster of the running driver.
Dell CSM is an ever-growing ecosystem. The official references for all modules are the documentation website, https://dell.github.io/csm-docs/docs/, and umbrella repository, https://github.com/dell/csm.
Dell is committed to releasing an updated version of the driver every 90 days. CSI and CSM are fully open source and supported by Dell through the community (Slack, GitHub) and Dell Support.