Welcome to Volumez

Volumez is a new architecture for block and file storage in the cloud. Volumez separates the storage control plane, hosted in the Volumez cloud, from the storage data plane, which runs in customer virtual private clouds and data centers.

Volumez is not a scale-up or scale-out storage architecture. It is not even a storage system in the conventional sense, although it replaces cloud storage systems in practice.

At its core, Volumez is composable infrastructure software that makes it easy for developers to request storage resources, similar to the way they request CPU and Memory resources in Kubernetes.

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Volumez connects NVMe instance storage to compute instances over the network, and composes a dedicated, pure Linux storage stack for data services on each compute instance. The Volumez data path is direct from raw NVMe media to compute servers, eliminating the need for storage controllers and software-defined storage services.

Features and Benefits

Composable

Declarative

Extreme Performance

Observable

Built with Linux

Composable

Declarative

Extreme Performance

Observable

Built with Linux

In composable infrastructure, storage, networking, and compute resources are abstracted from their physical locations and provided dynamically to applications. Volumez profiles the performance and capabilities of each infrastructure component and uses this information to compose direct Linux data paths between media and applications. Once the composing work is done, there is no need for the control plane to be in the way between applications and their data. This enables applications to get enterprise-grade logical volumes, with extreme guaranteed performance, and enterprise-grade services that are built on top of Linux – such as snapshots, thin provisioning, erasure coding, and more.

Volumez allows data services to be provisioned with code by simply specifying the IOPS, latency, and resilience desired for an application. Unlike traditional software-defined storage that requires developers and platform engineers to translate application requirements into concepts like media types, RAID, erasure codes, multipathing, and replication, simply tell Volumez what the application needs with a few lines of YAML, JSON or GUI clicks. Volumez then composes a dedicated data path in your environment that connects the application directly to raw media and performs exactly as requested, all the time. It really is that simple.

Consistent high performance and low latency I/O is a challenge, especially on Kubernetes in the public cloud. Volumez supports 2M 4K random read/write IOPS per volume at 144 uSec latency on volumes of any size and on every cloud platform that we support. We often hear phrases like “astonished” and “unreal” when customers report back after testing our technology. Volumez is a great fit for applications with extremely low latency requirements, where speed directly translates to customer experience.

Volumez provides full observability, including extensive performance metrics and logging, making life easier for cloud engineering teams who do not have to build and maintain custom tooling. The Volumez control plane continuously monitors every component of the infrastructure, allowing for deep inspection of historical performance, either using Volumez’ web interface or via API.

Over the years, Linux has become the tech industry’s default operating system. Its storage stack is reliable, feature-rich, and delivers astonishing performance when configured with precision. Volumez harnesses the power of cutting-edge kernel technologies to deliver unmatched performance and reliability. It’s also the end of storage vendor lock-in because 100% of your data plane is the same Linux kernel that is running every day on millions of servers around the world. This promise of reliability, features, performance, and openness is why Volumez does not use a proprietary data plane and why we are on a mission to make Linux the tech industry’s default storage stack.

Deploy

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Volumez deploys in seconds on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, but your journey starts right here on volumez.com. After registering and signing in, you start by choosing your cloud provider:

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Then choose a Kubernetes or VM environment:

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And then setup your environment. If you’re a new user, give Automatic mode a try.

4

The Easy Starter option is great for new users. Simply choose a region, cut-and-paste the generated code into your terminal, and hit enter. That’s it. Really.

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The Volumez connector registers nodes eligible for composing with the control plane. See their status in the Nodes View:

Compose

The connector discovers instance media that can be assigned and composed by Volumez. The connector profiles each media and the control plane stores its capacity, IOPS, bandwidth, and latency capabilities in your media registry. When slices of media are composed into data paths, Volumez decrements free capacity, IOPS, and bandwidth from the media, forming the basis of guaranteed performance SLAs:

Policies are templates for the guaranteed performance, resilience, and data governance of provisioned volumes. You can create or modify policies in the Policy View, or use one of the defaults:

				
					apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
    name: regional-high-performance
provisioner: vlz
volumeBindingMode: Immediate
parameters:
  Policy: regional-high-performance
  VolumeType: file
  Zone: eastus-1
allowVolumeExpansion: true
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: postgres-prod
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi     
  storageClassName: regional-high-performance

Once a Policy is defined, it can be referenced in Storage Classes and Persistent Volume Claims.

Watch the Demo Video

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