Modern IT environments demand platforms capable of running any type of application, from traditional virtualized to cutting-edge, cloud-native and AI/ML workloads.
Red Hat OpenShift has positioned itself as a trusted enterprise Kubernetes platform that enables organizations to deliver all their applications in new ways, supporting deployments across edge, datacenter, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Within the Red Hat OpenShift platform, organizations can manage containers and virtual machines (VMs). VMs isolate the hardware, typically running applications on top of OS dependencies, a kernel, hypervisor, and hardware.
Conversely, containers isolate the process, running applications on OS dependencies layered on a container host (kernel), hypervisor, and hardware. While containers offer significant flexibility, container environments present unique challenges such as:
Container security: image scanning, patching, and compliance.
Day 2 management: installations, upgrades, maintenance, and integration.
Application delivery: monitoring, metering, management, and integration.
This article discusses comprehensive data protection for OpenShift and protecting containers and virtual machines with Trilio.
Data protection for cloud-native apps
As organizations leverage Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to integrate traditional virtualized workloads alongside cloud-native applications, the need for a robust, unified data protection strategy becomes critical. Reliable backup and restore capabilities are essential for ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery.
The responsibility for protecting these workloads often falls on specific roles. VM administrators are frequently tasked with the day-to-day management, backup, and restoring of virtual guests and their applications. Virtual infrastructure administrators manage the underlying physical infrastructure, storage, and networking necessary for successfully running VM resources.
This highlights the need for a solution that can address the data protection requirements of both virtual machines and containers in a converged environment like this and makes the transition easy for traditional VM administrators familiar with legacy virtualization technologies but not necessarily with OpenShift Virtualization.
Trilio is recognized as a leader in cloud-native data protection for Kubernetes, KubeVirt, and OpenStack environments. Customers across industries (including telecom, defense, automotive, and financial services) trust Trilio’s technology for critical operations, such as disaster recovery or migrating workloads to new infrastructure. It seamlessly integrates with OpenShift by an operator that, once installed, creates a menu in the OpenShift console (Figure 1). The operator framework makes it easy to integrate partner products with OpenShift and manage their lifecycle.
Trilio's advanced solutions
Trilio provides the same advanced backup and recovery capabilities for containers and VMs running on OpenShift. The most important features that makes it an outstanding solution include:
- High granularity: With Trilio, customers can decide what needs to be backed up and restored, whether it is a complete namespace, an operator (to prevent unexpected issues after upgrading it), a container image, or some files in a VM or any other element, instead of having to take large comprehensive backups all the time.
- No vendor lock-in: Trilio uses non-proprietary backup formats—QCOW2 for data and JSON for metadata.
- Effective protection against ransomware with immutable backups and LUKS-256 bit encryption.
- Recover anywhere, be it bare metal, any cloud, or a mix of them.
- Any storage: Backups and restores can be performed to/from any S3, NFS, or Blob storage.
- Recovery with transforms that allows customers to modify the resources of the restored components, e.g. change the CPU, memory or even chipset of a VM.
- Faster disaster recovery: Trilio offers fast recovery time objective (RTO) in case of disaster thanks to Trilio Continuous Restore, which automatically creates a snapshot in the disaster recovery cluster every time a backup is taken on the main one (Figure 2).
The synergy between Trilio and Red Hat technologies goes beyond OpenShift. It also integrates with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. For example it manages the lifecycle of the Trilio operator in all Red Hat OpenShift clusters, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has a dedicated collection on Automation Hub, allowing you to cover complex scenarios like unattended recoveries triggered by Event-Driven Ansible. The administrator’s tasks are highly simplified when they don't have to do them manually.
Wrap up
Protecting your vital virtual machines and containers running on Red Hat OpenShift is essential for ensuring resilience and business continuity. Trilio provides robust and innovative capabilities to back up, restore, and protect these crucial workloads effectively across any type of infrastructure.
Curious to see this data protection solution in action? Contact a Red Hat or Trilio sales representative to learn how to perform essential management activities like operator installation, creating backup targets, defining backup plans, and executing restores for your critical OpenShift workloads.
