Rancher Labs, creators of the most widely used Kubernetes management platform, today announced the general availability (GA) 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. 

Kubernetes is fast becoming the foundation of the modern application infrastructure. IDC predicts that by 2022, 70% of enterprises will have deployed unified VMs, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud management processes and tools across all cloud and on-premise deployments. As enterprises look to use Kubernetes to manage stateful applications (any program that captures data about each client session and uses that data the next time the client makes a request), they also mandate support for persistent storage to elevate these stateful applications to first-class citizens of the Kubernetes world.   

"As enterprises deploy more production applications in containers, the need for persistent container storage continues to grow rapidly," said Sheng Liang, CEO at Rancher Labs. "Longhorn fills the need for a 100% open source and easy-to-deploy enterprise-grade Kubernetes storage solution." 

Open Source Enterprise-Grade Storage for Kubernetes

Longhorn increases developer and ITOps efficiency by making persistent storage easy to deploy with a single click, and without the cost overhead of proprietary alternatives. It also reduces the resources required to manage data and operate environments, enabling teams to focus on shipping code faster, and delivering better applications.  

Longhorn is 100% open source, distributed block storage built using microservices. Since the product was released in Beta in 2019, thousands of users have battle-hardened Longhorn by stress-testing the product as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox project. 

The GA version of Longhorn delivers a rich set of enterprise storage features, including:

• Thin-provisioning, snapshots, backup, and restore
• Non-disruptive volume expansion
• Cross-cluster disaster recovery volume with defined RTO and RPO
• Live upgrade of Longhorn software without impacting running volumes
• Full-featured Kubernetes CLI integration and standalone UI
  

Users can leverage Longhorn to create distributed block storage mirrored across local disks.  Longhorn also serves as a bridge to integrate enterprise-grade storage with Kubernetes by enabling users to deploy Longhorn on existing NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel storage arrays and on cloud storage systems like AWS EBS, all the while adding useful features such as application-aware snapshots, backups, and remote replication. 

Rancher has a long history of collaboration with storage system vendors including NetApp, EMC, and Pure Storage. and with software-defined container-native storage vendors including Portworx, StorageOS, and OpenEBS. "Our support of Longhorn does not change our partnership with our storage partners who offer numerous additional capabilities beyond Longhorn," added Liang. "We believe, by being 100% open source and easy-to-deploy, Longhorn will help bring additional persistent workloads into the Kubernetes ecosystem and help drive further demand for advanced storage systems."

Participants in a recent Longhorn user survey cited its simplicity, ease-of-use, and one-click deployment capabilities as key differentiators. They also praise Longhorn's built-in multi-cluster back up to external storage and DR as unique benefits, eliminating the need for ITOps, DevOps, storage Admins, and developers to invest time and resources provisioning dedicated third-party storage infrastructure.

Existing Rancher users can easily install Longhorn from Rancher's app catalog.  Longhorn is also free to download and use, and customers looking for support can purchase a premium support model with the same SLAs provided through Rancher Support Services. There are no licensing fees, and node-based subscription pricing keeps costs to a minimum. Demonstrating the company's commitment to storage, the Longhorn engineering team has grown three-fold, and as Longhorn further matures, it will become ever more tightly integrated with Rancher's central ‘Run Kubernetes Everywhere' strategy.