Intelligent IO Acceleration
Intelligent. Adaptive. Infinite. Incomparable.
Diamanti Intelligent Network and Storage Architecture
Diamanti’s unmatched performance and resource utilization is driven by a unique hyper-converged architecture purpose-built for the way containers use network and storage resources.
Performance:
Hardware-Accelerated Performance. Software-Defined Control.
On Diamanti, network and storage traffic are completely offloaded to dedicated PCI-e processors. The platform dramatically adjusts network and storage resource allocations across cluster to satisfy each container’s I/O requirements.
- Maximum host utilization
- Enhanced security
- Full-featured CNI and CSI
Benefits:
Diamanti’s unique networking and storage architecture delivers three crucial benefits:
Maximum host utilization
Network and storage overhead is eliminated; maximizing the CPU cycles available for application containers.
Enhanced security
Isolation of storage and network traffic coupled with service level controls render DDoS-type attacks ineffective.
Full-featured container network and storage interfaces
Diamanti’s CNI and CSI deliver unparalleled functionality across network configuration, network isolation, persistent storage, data protection, availability disaster recovery, and quality of service (QoS).
Networking:
Network Architecture and CNI
Diamanti Enterprise Kubernetes Platform seamlessly integrates with existing data center networks; and provides dedicated layer-2 interfaces to all containers. Diamanti’s network architecture features separate management and data planes. Application traffic on Diamanti’s SR-IOV-based data plane is completely isolated from the host network and other container networks at the hardware level; and bypasses the host network namespace.
Diamanti’s Container Network Interface (CNI) plug-in supports a broad range of policies:
Static and Dynamic IP Assignment
Define multiple subnets; or available IP address ranges. Applications are assigned IPs addresses dynamically from these pre-defined IP configurations, or they can be assigned a static; user-defined IP.
SR-IOV VF Interfaces
The Diamanti CNI manages SR-IOV Virtual Function (VF) interfaces on each node and assigns them dynamically to application containers when they are scheduled.
Support for Multiple Network Interfaces Per Pod
Assign multiple SR-IOV VF or network interfaces per pod and assign unique static or dynamic IPs to each interface. Source-based routing is configured in order to avoid asymmetric routing issues.
Network Performance Tiers
Set bandwidth limits for each provisioned SR-IOV VF interface to meet application SLAs. Users can define up to 8 performance tiers.
Cluster IP Mode Support
Diamanti CNI supports the Kubernetes headless model. In this model, CNI enables the complete isolation of container network traffic from other containers. Traffic gets forwarded directly from containers to the top-of-rack switch while maintaining SLA guarantees. This is unique to Diamanti’s networking architecture. All other solutions in the market forward traffic through the host network, which degrades performance.
Multi-Zone Clustering
Diamanti’s CNI enables the configuration of availability zones across different data centers. Applications are dynamically assigned IP addresses based on affinity/anti-affinity criteria, subnet/IP policies, and the availability zone in which they are scheduled.
Storage:
Storage Architecture and CSI
Diamanti’s innovative block storage architecture provides containerized applications with easily consumable persistent volumes delivered by high-performance, low-latency NVMe SSDs extended across the cluster.
Diamanti’s storage controller dynamically assigns PCIe VF interfaces to pods as they are scheduled, presenting each virtualized volume as a native NVMe block device.
Diamanti’s Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in offers a broad range of enterprise features and capabilities:
Static and Dynamic Volume Provisioning
With Diamanti, storage volumes can be provisioned directly by a storage administrator, or automatically as a result of creating a persistent volume claim (PVC).
Quality of Service (QoS)
Diamanti allows for the creation of up to 8 user-defined performance tiers which can be assigned on a per-volume basis in order to guarantee IOPS.
Enterprise Storage Features
Diamanti offers users a full complement of enterprise-grade data services such as mirroring, snapshots, asynchronous replication, backup, restore and volume resizing. These features provide disaster recovery and data protection (DR/DP). Diamanti’s Allocate-on-Write snapshot technology ensures no performance impact on applications when snapshots are created. Read more about these services in this blog.
Support for External iSCSI and NFS Storage
Diamanti’s storage plugin augments direct-attached, high-performance NVMe with external iSCSI/NFS/object storage. External storage traffic is completely isolated from the management network and other existing container networks. This is done using a dedicated virtual network interface to which network policies can be applied (For example, bandwidth limitations and QoS).
Support for Multi-Zone Clustering
Diamanti’s intelligent storage scheduler is aware of the topology of availability zones (AZs). Diamanti creates volumes in the same availability zone where pods are scheduled, using a delayed volume provisioning feature. Mirrored volumes are, by default, spread across availability zones for fault tolerance.
Storage Support for KVMs and Containers on a Single Platform
Diamanti uses the same CSI to provision storage to Pods and KVMs. Additionally, it uses the Linux capability of PCIe passthrough to attach a virtual block device to a KVM instance. i.e. using PCIe passthrough the virtual block device binds to the native NVMe driver of the guest OS. This allows virtual machines to benefit from Diamanti’s Kubernetes and data services features such as storage classes, Quality-of-Service (QoS), snapshots, etc.