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26.2-PRE

Simplyblock is happy to release the general availability release of Simplyblock 26.2-PRE.

New Features

  • Storage Plane: Added support for DH-CHAP and transport layer security (TLS) for the storage plane and communication between NVMe targets and initiators.
  • Storage Plane: Added support volume backup and restore. The new mechanism takes backups of snapshots and sends the snapshot-chains to an S3-compatible storage. Backup retention, merge policies, and auto-backup schedules are configured via the operator. Snapshots can be restored into volumes (PVCs) on the same cluster or into a different cluster. Backup is storage-efficient (delta-only, compressed).
  • Storage Plane: Added support for remote snapshot replication. Snapshots can be asynchronously replicated btw. nodes and sites in a network-efficient manner.
  • Storage Plane: Added support for asynchronous replication which adds the ability to automatically failing-over and failing-back of selected volumes across sites with a certain time-gap/backlog (e.g., 5 minutes). This is useful for slow links and provides significantly better RTO (zero) and RPO (minimum: 1 minute) than traditional backups.
  • Storage Plane: Added support for FTT2 (failure to tolerate) which enables up to two failover paths. When enabled, simplyblock creates three communication paths between the initiators and the NVMe targets (primary, secondary, and tertiary) with identical subsystems able to process IO. This allows the loss or maintenance of any two nodes in the cluster, regardless of the combination, at a point in time.
  • Storage Plane: Added support for full multi-pathing within the storage cluster and between initiators and NVMe targets. This means that clients can have four (FTT=1) or six (FTT=2) connections via separate VLANs using separate networking paths. Each endpoint-combination uses two separate connections through the available network paths. It has advantages over simple bonding and multi-chassis link aggregation groups (MLAG).
  • Kubernetes: Added support for OpenShift-managed TLS certificates for communication within the control plane and cluster endpoints.
  • Kubernetes: Added support for namespaced volumes, which auto-create subsystems and namespaces within those subsystems in a pre-defined ratio (e.g., 8 or 16 namespaces per subsystem) in Kubernetes-based environments. The ratio can be configured via the operator.
  • Kubernetes: Added a new, experimental Kubernetes operator to simplify the deployment of Simplyblock control planes, storage planes, and the CSI driver in Kubernetes-based environments, such as OpenShift and Talos.
  • General: All container images are now based on RHEL 10 base images and use Python 3.12. This solves multiple open CVEs and additional vulnerabilities.

Fixes

No major fixes.

Upgrade Considerations

It is possible to upgrade from 26.1 and 25.10.5.

Known Issues

  • At the moment it is only possible to define one erasure coding schema per cluster.

Features to Expect with Next Major Release

  • The ability to use different erasure coding schemas within the same cluster.
  • A significant performance optimization during node outages (journal writes).
  • The ability to live migrate volumes between storage clusters.
  • Inline data integrity validation to prevent silent data corruption.
  • Support for hierarchical failure domains.