Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Snapshots Container Storage Modules (CSM) for Dell PowerFlex > Solution overview
Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) enables consistent integration and automation experiences extending enterprise storage capabilities to Kubernetes for cloud-native stateful applications. CSM reduces management complexity so developers can independently consume enterprise storage with ease and automate daily operations such as provisioning, snapshotting, replication, observability, authorization, application mobility, and resiliency.
Dell CSM Volume Group Snapshotter is an operator which extends Kubernetes API to support crash-consistent snapshots for groups of volumes. This operator consists of VolumeGroupSnapshot custom resource definition (CRD) and CSM Volumegroupsnapshotter Controller, which is a sidecar container that runs in the controller Pod of the container storage interface (CSI) driver.
This paper describes the Volume Group Snapshot feature of the Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) and how it can be used to take crash-consistent snapshots for Red Hat OpenShift Clusters running on Dell PowerFlex. It uses the dell-csi-extensions API, implemented by Dell PowerFlex CSI drivers, to manage volume group snapshots on Dell PowerFlex systems.