AIStor Volume Manager

This set of pages describes Volume Manager, a Container Storage Interface (CSI) for direct attached storage made by AIStor.

Volume Manager consists of two primary components:

  1. The Volume Manager CSI Driver installed directly to the Kubernetes cluster that provisions local volumes
  2. The Volume Manager Plugin installed on the local machine to manage the Volume Manager CSI Driver through the command line interface

At the basic level, Volume Manager is a distributed persistent volume manager. Volume Manager is not a storage system like a SAN (Storage Area Network) or a NAS (Network Attached Storage). Instead, you use Volume Manager to discover, format, mount, schedule and monitor drives across servers in a distributed environment.

Volume Manager uses these mounted drives to create persistent volumes (PV) that Kubernetes uses to fulfill persistent volume claims (PVCs).

Distributed data stores such as object storage, databases, and message queues benefit the most from direct attached storage. These solutions, built for the distributed environment, should handle high availability and data durability by themselves. Running such data stores on traditional SAN- or NAS-based CSI drivers adds an unnecessary layer of replication or erasure coding, resulting in extra network hops in the data path. Such additional layers of disaggregation result in increased complexity and poor performance.

Diagram comparing direct persistent volumes to network persistent volumes