Rancher to launch cloud native storage solution for Kubernetes

Rancher Labs launched the general availability (GA) of Longhorn, a cloud-native, lightweight and powerful distributed storage platform for Kubernetes. The combination of Rancher with Longhorn enables the deployment of persistent block storage in the Kubernetes environment easy, fast, and reliable.

Easy, fast, and reliable

Deployment with a single click from the Rancher application catalog also provides the ability to secure, provision and back up storage across any Kubernetes cluster. It means simplification of Kubernetes Storage.

Longhorn’s Beta version was released in 2019, since this date, thousands of users have battle-hardened Longhorn by stress-testing the product as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox project. Sheng Liang, CEO at Rancher Labs, said,

“As enterprises deploy more production applications in containers, the need for persistent container storage continues to grow rapidly. Longhorn fills the need for a 100% open source and easy-to-deploy enterprise-grade Kubernetes storage solution.”

The general availability version of Longhorn delivers a rich set of enterprise storage features, including:

• Thin-provisioning, snapshots, backup, and restore
• Non-disruptive volume expansion
• Cross-cluster disaster recovery volume with defined RTO and RPO
• Live upgrade of Longhorn software without impacting running volumes
• Full-featured Kubernetes CLI integration and standalone UI
• Users can leverage Longhorn to create distributed block storage mirrored across local disks. Longhorn also serves as a bridge to integrate enterprise-grade storage with Kubernetes by enabling users to deploy Longhorn on existing NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel storage arrays and on cloud storage systems like AWS EBS, all the while adding useful features such as application-aware snapshots, backups, and remote replication.