Docker Containers
Innovate Faster with Agile IT

Overview:

The Opportunity for Containers

In order to remain competitive, businesses today must innovate at a faster pace than ever before. To this end, many IT organizations build DevOps teams (Development Operations) who leverage agile next generation technologies to shorten software development times and enable a faster, smarter, more innovative enterprise. One such technology that is gaining strong traction is containers. A common challenge: to reap the full value of containers for data-intensive applications, enterprises need persistent storage designed to fully support container frameworks and meet the reliability requirements these apps demand.

Envision DevOps with API-driven Predictive Flash

That’s why HPE Nimble Storage offers fast and reliable persistent, shared storage and integrated data protection needed to keep developers productive at all times. With the most comprehensive Docker Volume plugin on the market, Nimble’s API-driven Predictive Flash platform offers the self-service control DevOps teams need and the effortless operations IT requires.

Do Business at the Speed of DevOps

Treat storage and data infrastructure as code.
Only HPE Nimble Storage exposes the full power of its entire platform within native Docker tools so DevOps teams and Docker admins can unleash productivity for even developers working with stateful apps and databases. It’s easy to use Docker command line and APIs to provision, manage, and automate tasks for persistent volumes. No storage expertise is required. Some cool capabilities to try:

• Containerize any stateful application with its persistent storage from your Nimble array in seconds. Enjoy seamless cutover importing your Nimble data volume or zero-copy clone to a container. No data copy is required.
• Give every developer a private copy of production data in minutes. Deploy 100 sandboxes in minutes for dev/test & QA with private copies of production and unstructured data and shared runtime libraries with Nimble zero-copy clones and stateful containers.
• Set SLA policies for persistent volumes. Fine tune each volume with NimbleOS profiles for traditional databases or unstructured data that offer pre-determined block sizes, caching policies, and compression settings.
• Ensure containers are up and running at all times with Docker Swarm
  • Automatically schedule containers to a new node in the swarm if an existing node goes down without losing access to your persistent volumes
  • Seamless upgrade for stateful containers: move containers to new faster nodes without losing access to persistent data or requiring down time

Simplify software development with API-driven Predictive Flash

Simplify IT Operations and Cut Costs

Meet developers’ needs without working weekends and free up IT for strategic projects. It’s easy when you leave the storage and data infrastructure to Nimble. Choose Nimble shared storage and storage efficiency for your persistent volumes to get started with stateful containers faster, spend less time on maintenance, and maximize container cost reduction, savings, and scale.

Setup and provision in minutes not days.
Nimble arrays work right out of the box and come with performance profiles that eliminate manual storage tuning for applications.

Enjoy effortless operations, and amazing support with InfoSight.
Every Nimble array comes with InfoSight predictive analytics that detect 90% of issues — without IT staff lifting a finger, and before developers notice. When you need live help, you’ll talk to a level three support engineer who can resolve issues quickly.

Maximize server virtualization savings by combining containers with efficient, shared storage and built-in data reduction features, such as deduplication, compression, and more. Achieve higher performance and capacity, a much smaller footprint and cut capital costs by as much as 65% because Nimble arrays are built with a flash architecture that is a generation beyond other all-flash arrays.

Achieve simplicity and high availability from shared storage.
Nimble arrays have achieved 99.9999% measured availability across over 10,000+ customer deployments.

Improve security, data protection, and more for persistent volumes.
All-inclusive licensing lets you immediately leverage data encryption, snapshots, replication, zero-copy clones, thin provisioning, and more. So you can add more safeguards to your container environments — without going over budget.

Predictive Flash: Persistent, shared storage designed for containers

Features:

Features Available to Docker with the HPE Nimble Storage Plug-in

High Availability
Fully integrated into Docker Swarm for seamless orchestration of scheduling and running containers on any host in the swarm.

Performance Policies
Use pre-defined application performance profiles based on 10,000+ successful customer deployments.

Volume Placement
Control data separation and performance needs by placing volumes in separate pools within Nimble clusters.

Volume Encryption
Control data at rest encryption for sensitive data and applications.

Thin Provisioning
Depending on the chargeback model, policies and storage guarantees, volumes may be thick- or thin-provisioned.

Variable Block Deduplication and Compression
Market leading storage efficiency is selectable per volume, achieving up to 5X or more data reduction.

Zero-copy Clones
Clone data from a production volume to stage dev/test. This work with both Docker and non-Docker volumes.

Volume Import
Import Nimble volumes from existing environments into a Docker volume — via a direct cut-over or cloned snapshot.

Permissions and Ownership
Fine-grained control over the mount point to ensure applications run seamlessly with the level of permissions and ownership required.

Benefits:

Lift & Shift Data with Applications

Simple. Reliable. Efficient.

Documentation:

Download Solution Brief: Docker Container Solution (PDF).