Container technologies enable development teams to quickly provision isolated applications. Customers who want to boost their productivity and reduce the time to value, can use containers with the departments that are focused on software development.

Kubernetes orchestration provides capabilities such as auto scaling, security, and management of containerized applications. A persistent and stable data store is required to run containerized applications within a Kubernetes cluster, that can survive the lifetime of a pod or the node it is running on.

SUSE Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform that simplifies the cluster installation and operations, whether they are on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge, giving the DevOps team freedom to build and run containerized applications anywhere.

The PowerFlex family offers key value propositions for traditional and cloud-native production workloads, deployment flexibility, linear scalability, predictable high performance, and enterprise-grade resilience.

Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager enables users to protect, manage, and recover data in on-premises, virtualized, or cloud deployments. The PowerProtect Data Manager platform provides centralized governance that helps mitigate risk and assures compliance of SLAs and SLOs through protection workflows. PowerProtect Data Manager is used to discover, protect, and restore production workloads in Kubernetes environments and protects production and development, or test workloads to ensure that the data is easy to backup and restore.

PowerProtect Data Manager enhances the protection by sending the data directly to the Dell EMC PowerProtect DD series appliance to gain benefits from unmatched efficiency, deduplication, performance, and scalability. Together with PowerProtect Data Manager, PowerProtect DD series appliance is the ultimate protection storage appliance.

This paper discusses how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster using SUSE Rancher Kubernetes Engine on a PowerFlex cluster and the use of the PowerFlex CSI 1.4 driver to provision persistent storage for Kubernetes managing containerized applications. This white paper also describes how to protect the workloads that are deployed in a SUSE Rancher managed Kubernetes cluster with PowerProtect Data Manager and DD series appliance.