Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation

Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation provides cloud-native data services for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP) or any other infrastructure. OpenShift Data Foundation implementations avoid common storage issues, such as a lack of portability, deployment burden, and vendor lock-in. Running as a Kubernetes service, and following the Kubernetes operator model, OpenShift Data Foundation provides access to file, block, and object storage, based on Ceph technology. These features enable the platform to run a wide range of workloads, including the following ones:

• Data at rest, such as databases and data warehouses
• Data in motion, such as pipelines
• Data in action, such as continuous deployment tools, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML)

Furthermore, OpenShift Data Foundation uses the multicloud object gateway (MCG) service, which is based on the NooBaa project, to act as a data federation service.

The MCG service provides a local object service (S3 API), which is backed by local storage or cloud-native storage. This storage service provides the same user experience regardless of being on-premise or in the cloud. Finally, OpenShift Data Foundation uses the Rook-Ceph storage operator to manage and orchestrate persistent volume claims and dynamic provisioning.

Benefits of OpenShift Data Foundation Compared with NFS Storage

OpenShift Data Foundation is a highly available cloud-native storage environment with multisite availability. It removes various network file system (NFS) limitations to provide the following benefits:

• Reduces administrative workload.
• Provides a true single-node access (RWO) mode, to avoid data corruption.
• Can reuse persistent volume claim (PVC) names without data loss.
• Important RHOCP services, such as registry, metrics, and logging, support OpenShift Data Foundation.

Benefits of OpenShift Data Foundation Compared with EBS Storage

OpenShift Data Foundation can provide high availability (HA) across availability zones (AZs) in cloud environments.

Due to the capabilities of Ceph storage, OpenShift Data Foundation can replicate and store data by using a controlled replication under scalable hashing (CRUSH) algorithm, which avoids a single point of failure.

Thus, you can configure OpenShift Data Foundation to use storage from different clouds, regions, and AZs.

OpenShift Data Foundation also removes many limitations of elastic block store (EBS) storage, to provide the following benefits:

• Support for RWX access mode, and not only for RWO access mode
• Regional HA and portability
• Unlimited volume size
• Unlimited instance attachments

Benefits of OpenShift Data Foundation Compared with vSphere Volumes

vSphere volumes are backed by VMware vSphere Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) files. OpenShift Data Foundation removes many limitations of vSphere volumes, to provide the following benefits:

• Support for RWX access mode, and not only for RWO access mode
• Regional HA and portability
• Compatible with volume snapshots
• No vendor lock-in