Hedvig's New Solution for Storage Provisioning and Data Persistence for Docker

Hedvig has joined the ClusterHQ storage partner ecosystem to offer an integrated solution for storage provisioning and data persistence for Docker volumes. Hedvig and ClusterHQ collaborated on the development of the Hedvig storage driver for Flocker, a software plugin that integrates Hedvig’s software-defined storage solution and ClusterHQ’s Flocker container data management software. 

The collaboration with ClusterHQ eliminates storage bottlenecks with Docker. Hedvig’s distributed storage architecture is designed for containerized applications and microservices environments and with Flocker users can orchestrate storage with Docker for real production environments.

Together, Hedvig and ClusterHQ simplify the provisioning of storage and ensure data persistence. With the Hedvig storage driver for Flocker, stateful data volumes follow containers as they move between hosts in the environment, and data can be preserved beyond the life of the containers themselves.

ClusterHQ’s solution allows enterprises to take advantage of the agility benefits of containers for their databases and other stateful services, while Hedvig’s software-defined approach to storage provides flexibility, dynamic provisioning and the cost economics of commodity server infrastructure.

The Hedvig storage driver for Flocker exploits Hedvig’s ability to deliver a full suite of software-based advanced data services - including deduplication, compression, and tunable replication - on a per-volume basis. Hedvig provides a raw virtual block disk, which can be formatted using any file system and used for storing any kind of data.

Steps to use a Hedvig Virtual Disk (vdisk) inside Docker containers:

- Flocker requests a new volume from Hedvig, which in turn creates a new Hedvig block vdisk.

- Different parameters like deduplication, compression, replication factor and block size can be set along with each volume, using Flocker config.

- This vdisk can then be attached to any host. Flocker then creates a filesystem on this vdisk and mounts it using the path provided by user. The filesystem type can also be configured by the user.

- All I/O to the volume will now go through Hedvig vdisk/storage

- As the container moves in the environment, the vdisk will be automatically detached and reattached to any host and data will be persisted using the policies chosen during volume creation.

In today’s Docker environment it can be difficult to facilitate persistent data storage for stateful applications. The Hedvig and ClusterHQ joint solution solves this problem, with three differentiators:

- Dynamic storage provisioning: Volume/vdisk creation is instantaneous, even if when creating volumes of the order of terabytes or petabytes. The services never pre-allocates any physical storage for a vdisk and hence any vdisk size update is simply a metadata update. This enables users to increase their volume size at any point.

- Flexible volume configuration: Flocker can leverage data storage policy settings at the volume level to set vdisk features (dedupe, etc.) and allow containers with different storage requirements on the same host. In situations were there are is an email server and image server running as two different containerized applications on the same host, and there is the flexibility of enabling dedupe and compression for the email server, but disable these same services for the image server.

- Automatic data migration: As containers move to new nodes, Flocker automatically manages detaching data volumes from source nodes and attaching to target nodes. There is no physical movement of data and hence there is no additional downtime associated with data movement.

Hedvig and ClusterHQ will host a webinar on Sept. 24 at 10 AM PT to discuss how the Hedvig and ClusterHQ partnership accelerates the adoption of Docker in the enterprise with a solution that delivers persistent storage for Docker container. Click here to register.

The Hedvig storage driver for Flocker is currently available on GitHub.