SUSE-Dell Technologies partnership continues to shine with Joint Open Source Solutions

More value. Less effort. Less worry. No lock-in.

For more than 20 years now, these are the shared values of SUSE and our partners at Dell Technologies. We believe in our joint ventures, but we still want you to feel you have the final decision to love us, no questions asked. And that’s how the future should be because it will be widely distributed over sensors and machines, in the cloud, on-premise and at the edge, all with a strong open-source backbone.

Together we continue to collaborate over platform integration, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) support, and a solid compute foundation. We enable enterprises to deploy interoperable platforms for mission-critical computing and delivery IT services across your own blend of physical, virtual and cloud environments. And we base it all on SUSE Linux.

Now we have released joint solutions to reach that reliability and scalability you need, even at the farthest edge:

1. Dell Compute Platform backed by EMC PowerEdge Servers
2. SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro operating system
3. K3s lightweight Kubernetes distribution
4. SUSE Rancher multi-cluster Kubernetes management

The team at SUSE has written white documentation that explains the benefits of each new technical collaboration and streamlined integration. We will give a brief intro to each one now.

Rancher Kubernetes Cluster Data Protection using PowerProtect Data Manager and CSI Driver

Containerization is the de facto mode of development for many teams these days because they can work more independently to deliver value faster. And containers have become synonymous with Kubernetes orchestration, which escalates it all with auto-scaling, security and management of containerized applications.

SUSE acquired Rancher Kubernetes management platform over a year ago because it is the best of breed at simplifying the often cumbersome cluster installation and operations — in the cloud, on-premise, or at the edge, wherever DevOps teams want to be.

Dell EMC provides the other side of the stability and reliability you need with its PowerProtect Data Manager, which enables users to protect, manage, and recover development, testing and production data workloads in Kubernetes environments, wherever it’s distributed, ensuring you will meet your SLAs and SLOs through protection workflows.

This white paper takes you step by step through how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster using SUSE Rancher Kubernetes Engine on a PowerFlex cluster and the use of the PowerFlex CSI driver to provision persistent storage for Kubernetes managing containerized applications.

Read this reference architecture.

CSI Drivers by Dell EMC implements an interface between Kubernetes Container Storage Interface — usually called CSI — and Dell EMC Storage Arrays. It’s a simple plug-in installed into Kubernetes to provide persistent storage using the Dell storage system.

Rancher Kubernetes Engine supports the full Dell EMC offering of:

• PowerMax
• PowerFlex
• Unity
• PowerScale
• PowerStore

Learn the steps to install CSI drives for PowerFlex starting Page 26. (In just 13 quick steps to verified output.)

Open source code to the Dell EMC CSM and CSI Drivers. Including installation, uninstallation, upgrading, features, troubleshooting, release notes, and an example of how Dell CSI Drivers support SUSE Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) v1.2.8.

All this, so you can innovate anywhere.