#1 most frequent
United States of America
66.7%2 installations of 3
What is Longhorn Block Storage?
Longhorn is cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes, supported by Rancher Labs headquartered in Cupertino.
Categories & Use Cases
Who Buys & Uses Longhorn Block Storage
#2 most frequent
Luxembourg
33.3%1 installation of 3
Longhorn - Block-based Software Defined Storage for Kubernetes
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Longhorn Block Storage as primary Persistent Storage in our Kubernetes platform based on Rancher. Before changing to Longhorn we used file-based solutions NFS and GlusterFS, which were incapable of hosting databases especially NoSQL blob storage used in ElasticSearch, Redis, ETCD, RabbitMQ and similar products, what resulted in common data corruption issues. Longhorn Block Storage gave us what we needed: secure, replicated and reasonably fast persistent storage.
Pros
- Leverages industry standard protocol (iSCSI)
- Is block-based storage instead of file-based
- Is truly software defined storage (SDS)
- Can use commodity hardware to build redundant SDS
- Is open-source software
- Is one of the CNCF projects
- Provides enterprise functionalities like snapshots or backups
Cons
- ReadWriteMany Longhorn volumes are still using NFS (file-based) protocol in the core.
- Using iSCSI as main protocol instead of FC ties Longhorn to Ethernet-based LAN which is in most architectures much slower that FC-based SAN.
- Longhorn could implement S3 as alternative access protocol to its volumes.
- Backups, and snapshots configuration could be configured at each volume-level by administrators (maybe from additional CRD object?), because currently is configured at storage-class level which is not granular enough.
Return on Investment
- Longhorn is fully open source. One can try and/or use Longhorn for free even in enterprise and buy subscriptions only for environments that must be fully supported. We started with Longhorn in our lab environment and followed on through reference platform to non-production and production environments.
- Longhorn subscriptions are not cheap, but its biggest advantage is that price-to-functionality ratio is very reasonable.
- We have volumes with hundreds of gigabytes of data and these on Longhorn perform well in solutions where file-based GlusterFS volumes were corrupting data.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Red Hat Gluster Storage, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerScale
Other Software Used
SUSE Rancher, VMware vCenter, VMware ESXi, SUSE NeuVector, OpenSearch
Longhorn Block Storage s an easy to use RWX storage for your Kubernetes cluster
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Longhorn Block Storage for Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster storage requirements. It is easily installed from Rancher web GUI with a few mouse clicks. Longhorn Block Storage solves our problem with read-write many (RWX) volumes. Many solutions provide only read-write once (RWO). Longhorn Block Storage, in the beginning, also did not support RWX, but the support was added in v1.1.0. Also, it's easy to make scheduled or on-demand volume snapshots using Longhorn web GUI. We use it to schedule regular volume snapshots and, in case of data corruption or other disasters, restore data back to volumes. Snapshots are lightning fast because Longhorn Block Storage is built on block storage.
Pros
- Creates read-write many (RWX) volumes
- Longhorn Block Storage is an easy to deploy solution
- Scheduled and on-demand volume snapshots can be created using web GUI
- Volume backups can be stored offsite on any S3 compatible storage solution
- Backups and snapshots can be restored using web GUI
Cons
- Version to version upgrades takes more expertise to do than initial deployment
- If something goes wrong, you will need a help from support
- Longhorn Block Storage speed is slightly slower than local disk storage speed
Most Important Features
- Longhorn Block Storage is an easy to deploy solution
- Easy to create/restore volume snapshots
- Supports read-write many volume type
Return on Investment
- It has provided a highly available storage solution for almost all our Kubernetes deployments
- We can deploy new app versions with peace in mind because we have working data backups
- Application development is faster because devs can play with data and easily restore it when needed
Other Software Used
AlmaLinux OS, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Drupal, Zabbix, Splunk Enterprise, HAProxy