Catalogic CloudCasa makes room for persistent volume backup

Catalogic has built new features into its CloudCasa backup-as-a-service platform to provides customers with new Kubernetes persistent volume backups and more choices on where to store backups and snapshots.

Catalogic CloudCasa previously only took container storage interface (CSI) snapshots and captured the configuration data necessary to restore them. In this features update, CloudCasa added support for Amazon Elastic Block Storage snapshots as well, as CSI is not yet the industry default.

However, this update also extends CloudCasa's Kubernetes data protection capabilities beyond snapshotting, as the platform can now take complete backups and store them in a virtual air-gapped environment. Unlike snapshots, backups can be stored in a location independent from the production resource, offering higher recoverability. Although snapshots are useful for quickly recovering an environment to a previous point in time, they are not a substitute for backup copies.

Customers will be able to store up to 5 TB of Kubernetes persistent volume backups at no charge. Catalogic intends to charge a premium for customers who want to break the 5 TB storage limit in the future, but for now all CloudCasa services and features are free to use.

CloudCasa also added Azure as a cloud storage provider. Customers can have their CloudCasa backups stored in AWS or Azure and in the region of their choice. Furthermore, CloudCasa customers do not have to be customers of either cloud provider, as Catalogic manages the storage.

Since CloudCasa became available on Rancher and DigitalOcean Marketplace, Catalogic has seen an influx of established Kubernetes adopters, said COO Sathya Sankaran. These customers drove CloudCasa to add support for persistent volume backups, Azure and EBS snapshots.

Customers are past the experimenting phase with containers, and they're treating Kubernetes protection as a necessary component to what is now a critical production environment, Sankaran added.

"We used to have a lot of observers -- people who'll take a look around CloudCasa but won't actually put it to use because they don't have a Kubernetes system ready for backups. Now, we have a lot of practitioners," Sankaran said.

Catalogic's next plan for CloudCasa will be to build out features focused on security. Based on customer demand and from observing how more mature backup ecosystems have evolved, it's a logical step, Sankaran said. It won't be long before the same technology preventing bad actors from infiltrating on-premises backup systems will be demanded for cloud and container backups, as well, he added.

Backups are the insurance policy that can allow a customer to recover if they're attacked by ransomware.

Snapshots are one method of data protection, but it's not a substitute for backups, said Krista Macomber, a senior analyst at Evaluator Group. It's important not to conflate the two because backups, which can be isolated from the production environment, provide a better means to recover from ransomware.

"Backups are the insurance policy that can allow a customer to recover if they're attacked by ransomware," Macomber said.

The container backup market is still too nascent to pinpoint how customers generally prefer to protect their Kubernetes environments, Macomber said. However, Kubernetes workloads require persistent storage, which is becoming just as important to back up as any on-premises or virtualized workload. This means customers will likely want to follow the same practices that worked in the past and apply them to Kubernetes protection, such as adhering to the 3-2-1 rule, Macomber said.