Diamanti went deep with the latest update of its hybrid cloud Kubernetes control plane and operating system, extending its on-premises reach across the data center, edge, and public cloud.

Naren Narendra, senior director of product marketing for Diamanti, said that its Spektra 3.0 update deploys, replicates, and migrates stateful applications with application and data persistence. “Diamanti’s cloud-neutral Kubernetes management platform provides users the ability to make real-time data-driven decisions, enable access to applications, and maintain data security," he explained.

Diamanti provides a ready-made appliance that hosts containers, and more importantly, handles the networking and storage requirements for them — which is a particularly handsome service for organizations that want to run container workloads on-premises in their own data centers. The Spektra line packages together Kubernetes orchestration, container runtime, a CentOS Linux operating system, disaster recovery features, access controls, and Diamanti’s management user interface into a software stack. 

This means it runs containerized applications in a clustered, bare-metal hyperconverged system. And containers, being ephemeral, rely on virtualized networking and storage. A hypervisor can handle that virtualization, but Diamanti instead opted to create its own I/O controller.

Because the storage market is only getting bigger, Kubernetes is becoming a common software-based platform that needs to interoperate with dozens of variations of storage hardware from different vendors, on-premises to the cloud, Narendra said. “Portability between all of these different platforms requires a deep focus on the data plane itself: the point where software meets hardware," he added.

By combining software and hardware, Narendra said organizations gain a management framework and also access and resource management controls to provide secure isolation between multiple tenants spread across multiple clusters. Spektra 3.0 is “unique because it is the first and only all-in-one federated Kubernetes solution that includes both the software and hardware to provide a complete solution for stateful applications,” he explained. 

Users can deploy Spektra on Diamanti’s D20 hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform or appliances from Dell Technologies and Lenovo.

The Spektra 3.0 software stack targets management aspects for enterprises to migrate and replicate stateful applications into production in hybrid cloud environments whether that be in a private or public cloud. Spektra currently supports Microsoft Azure but plans to soon add Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

Version 3.0 allows administrators to target a migration or set up a disaster recovery policy for one of their applications from the same user interface where they manage the application. According to Narendra, with competing services such as Rancher Labs’ Longhorn or NetApp’s Astra, the control plane for managing clusters is handled separately from the data plane. 

“You jump into one UI to deploy an application and a separate UI to manage the data, including setting up snapshots, backup and restore, and initiating disaster recovery policies. With Diamanti Spektra 3.0, this is completely integrated into the experience,” Narendra said.

Additional isolation and security enable administrators to separate tenants within a single domain to support managed service providers (MSPs) that manage multiple clients. 

The expansion of Kubernetes is driving more large enterprises and managed service providers to support multiple business units or tenants, Narendra said, explaining why companies need a combination of IT environments, or a hybrid- and multi-cloud strategy. 

“The reality is that, with the exception of younger organizations with less reliance on legacy platforms to begin with, most companies need a combination of IT environments. Existing legacy systems of record are often too cumbersome and valuable and carry too many dependencies to lift and shift.” Narendra explained. “Combining on-premises legacy systems with modern cloud-based applications offers the best TCO and performance.” 

As more organizations use containers for their stateful applications, storage frameworks must evolve to manage multiple distributions of clusters spanning hybrid cloud environments. The increase in remote work plus the "existing normal of legacy systems married with cloud-native apps, is just another datum pointing toward a hybrid cloud environment as the most logical choice moving forward," he added.