Red Hat OpenShift natively offers ephemeral storage support for containers, where the data is cleared when the container is restarted. Even when persistent storage volumes are used, they are stored as files in the local server file system, where if the server is offline, then the data is lost. This creates challenges with the pod portability and data resiliency. Container Storage Interface (CSI) APIs were developed with native Kubernetes solutions to provide a standard for provisioning and managing on-demand block and file persistent volumes for containerized applications. The persistent volumes are created outside the host operating system, such as on the PowerFlex system, making the volume data available across the infrastructure without regard to the availability of a single server.

Dell storage solutions provide unique CSI plugins that allow customers to provision persistent PowerFlex storage volumes for container-based applications for both development and production scale. The combination of the Red Hat OpenShift cluster and PowerFlex CSI plug-in enables easy provisioning of persistent storage for the containers.

For more information about the PowerFlex container storage modules, see Dell CSI Driver Documentation.