Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Red Hat OpenShift 4.11 Deployment and Data Protection using PPDM on Dell PowerFlex 4.0 > Red Hat OpenShift cluster data protection using PowerProtect Data Manager
PowerProtect Data Manager (PPDM) ensures that the data remains consistent, durable, and is easy to back up and restore in a Kubernetes workload. PowerProtect DD series appliances are the only target for PowerProtect Data Manager. PowerProtect Data Manager adds the benefits of deduplication, performance, efficiency, and security. PowerProtect Data Manager provides a centralized management UI where protection policies can be defined to manage clusters, namespaces, and other RedHat OpenShift components.
PPDM is deployed using an Open Virtualization Appliance (OVA) and is integrated with PowerProtect DD series appliances as protection storage for backups. For more information about PowerProtect Data Manager deployment methods, see the Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Deployment Guide.
PPDM is integrated with an OpenShift managed Kubernetes cluster through Kubernetes APIs to discover protectable resources such as namespaces and persistent volume claims (PVCs). PPDM discovers the Kubernetes clusters using the IP address or FQDN. PPDM uses the discovery service account and the token to integrate with kube-apiserver.
The following high-level architecture diagram shows the data protection for an OpenShift cluster with PowerProtect Data Manager:
Figure 26. OpenShift cluster with PowerProtect Data Manager
Once the Kubernetes cluster is added as an asset source in PPDM and the discovery is complete, the associated namespaces are available as assets for protection. PPDM protects the namespaces, metadata, and PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs).
During the discovery process, the PPDM creates the following namespaces in the cluster:
Kubernetes uses persistent volumes to store the persisted application data. Persistent volumes are created on an external storage and then attached to a pod using the PVCs. PVCs can be included with other namespaces in PowerProtect Data Manager backup and recovery operations.