Astra Data Store
(1-2 minute read)
Fluid is on a quest to make everyone’s job easier, from DevOps engineers, to customers, to management, and everyone in between. This has been tackled, in this instance, with an integration with NetApp’s Astra Data Store that allows users to create very quickly, locations to store data on any vendor’s compute hardware –“anyware”.
Leveraging the power of NetApp’s ONTAP operating system;
“Fluid together with Astra Data Store has enabled a true software-defined architecture to be deployed, and redeployed as requirements change in line with business goals.” – Andrew Sjoquist, Fluid Founder.
This new feature is particularly noteworthy as it has proven to customers that they can have a flexible and adaptable technology in an ever-changing marketplace. Not only this, but the integration is complete at the click of a button, adding to the suite of ‘easy buttons’ Fluid already has in place.
The pandemic conditions in the last two years have shown that business conditions are prone to rapid and extreme change, and as such there should be an expectation your technology will adapt and be able to do the same.
The need for Astra Data Store to be deployed at the edge is rapidly increasing. For example, retail businesses are quickly seeking cutting-edge data sources, monitoring systems, and applications to evaluate new consumer behaviour sparked by the impact of COVID-19. “Sophisticated retailers are evolving how they evaluate stores and optimize their network.”-McKinsey, 2020.
Retailers are now taking a comprehensive data-driven approach that can’t always be serviced by the public cloud due to technical latency, data sovereignty, or geography limitations. Enter Fluid.
This solution, Fluid with Astra Data Store, is defined in software and therefore allows for the cloud capabilities to be wherever you require them, taking care of geographical needs and technical latency. It’s a cutting-edge technology with fast edge deployments and redeployments through an ‘easy button’ on the Fluid interface or via the Fluid API.
“After working closely with the Astra Data Store development teams to understand how to automatically deploy this software on Fluid nodes, we created a product that alleviates the burden on the end user to create the network configuration Astra Data Store requires,” said Sjoquist.
Ultimately, this partnership allows all clients to have a NetApp environment for their data without the need to purchase NetApp hardware, bringing the Fluid Team one step closer on our quest to make deployments for a variety of workloads easy for all.