Catalogic Software Extends CloudCasa Support to Kubernetes

Catalogic Software today announced it has made available support for backing up Kubernetes persistent volumes to cloud storage, including Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) persistent volumes, to its CloudCasa software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

At the same time, Catalogic is moving to make CloudCasa available on a subscription model based on how much capacity is consumed.

Catalogic Software CEO Ken Barth says rival offerings charge customers for both the infrastructure used and the amount of data being stored. The pricing model for CloudCasa reflects the fact that CloudCasa is a multitenant platform, he notes.

The company also makes available a free service that provides support for unlimited persistent volumes and snapshots of Amazon relational databases for up to 30 days with no limits on worker nodes or clusters, or any Kubernetes resource data included.

Catalogic Software also doesn’t charge for Amazon RDS snapshot management across multiple regions. There also a SafeLock protection capability that provides tamper-proof backups that are locked from deletion by any user action or application programming interface (API) call to make sure a pristine copy of data is always available.

Barth says the CloudCasa platform eliminates the need to acquire software and infrastructure to back up any distribution of Kubernetes running at the edge, in a local data center or on a public cloud. It supports Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), DigitalOcean, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher and VMware Tanzu. It is also designed to support cloud databases, as well.

Now that more stateful applications are being deployed on Kubernetes clusters running in production environments, the need for backup and recovery platforms to protect data is becoming more apparent. The challenge many organizations will face is that many of them will, over time, wind up running different version of Kubernetes provided by multiple vendors. Rather than acquiring tools for each platform, Catalogic Software is making a case for a centralized SaaS platform capable of supporting any distribution of Kubernetes.

There are no shortage of options when it comes to backup and recovery of Kubernetes clusters. Each IT team will need to decide for themselves whether they want to rely on legacy platforms and processes to protect those clusters versus shifting to a SaaS platform. In general, however, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, adoption of IT platforms that are accessed via the cloud has increased dramatically because they are easier for IT to access from anywhere.

Not every IT organization, of course, is running stateful applications on Kubernetes clusters. There are plenty that prefer to only run stateless applications that store data on an external platform. However, as the number of stateful applications running on fleets of Kubernetes clusters continues to increase, the probability one or more of them will experience some level of disruption because of equipment failure or a ransomware attack only increases. The challenge now is determining the simplest way to recover that data in the fastest way possible.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

Mike Vizard has 1659 posts and counting. See all posts by Mike Vizard