If you were thinking that nothing will change in your VMware data centre in the following years, think again. Data centre storage is experiencing a paradigm shift. Software-defined storage solutions, such as Ceph, bring flexibility and reduce operational costs. As a result, Ceph storage on VMware has the potential to revolutionise VMware clusters where SAN (Storage Area Network) was the incumbent for many years.

With enterprises and ISVs adopting containers and Kubernetes (k8s) to increase the agility and scalability of their applications, they would want more applications to be deployed on k8s. Applications can be a mix of stateful and stateless. Until recently, only stateless applications were supported by k8s. However, with the advent of persistent storage on k8s, stateful applications will be supported. In the pet Vs cattle analogy of service, you would want to treat the storage as cattle.

By 2025, IDC expects worldwide data to grow by 61 percent to 175 zettabytes. This increase in data consumption has contributed to a massive shift within the technology landscape in the last decade, where organizations have been forced to adapt to a digital-dependant world.

When Frodo was commissioned on a seemingly straightforward journey to retrieve the One Ring, I doubt he realized the adventure and commitment he was embarking on. Rancher Labs started on a similarly daring journey almost four years ago. It didn’t take a wizard showing up uninvited at dinner to convince us of this. From the beginning of Rancher Labs, our founding team had a deep conviction about the importance of storage in the future of cloud-first computing.

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Longhorn, an enterprise-grade, cloud-native container storage solution. Longhorn directly answers the need for an enterprise-grade, vendor-neutral persistent storage solution that supports the easy development of stateful applications within Kubernetes. We’ve been working on Longhorn for almost as long as we’ve been around as a company.