Driving Kubernetes Modernization Together: SUSE and CloudCasa

In today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape, enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud-native technologies like containers and Kubernetes to achieve greater efficiency, scale, and agility. However, this transition is often gradual, requiring organizations to manage traditional IT infrastructure alongside new cloud-native environments. This dual management can lead to increased costs and operational complexities. Furthermore, ensuring robust data protection, disaster recovery, and seamless migration across these diverse environments presents significant challenges.

SUSE Rancher Prime, an open-source platform, is designed to unify and streamline Kubernetes management across diverse infrastructures, including data centers, clouds, and the edge. SUSE Virtualization (Harvester) extends this capability by allowing enterprises to manage virtual machines (VMs) alongside containers within SUSE Rancher Prime, providing  unified management of  workloads and consolidating IT estates.

Complementing SUSE’s unified management approach, CloudCasa by Catalogic provides comprehensive, cost-effective cloud-native data protection for Kubernetes environments. It offers robust backup, disaster recovery, and migration capabilities across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. As a SUSE Certified Partner Solution, CloudCasa integrates seamlessly with the SUSE ecosystem, including SUSE Virtualization and SUSE Storage (Longhorn.)— working alongside these technologies to protect both container and VM workloads.

Addressing Key Challenges.

Organizations face several critical challenges in managing modern, hybrid IT estates.

• Rising Costs of Proprietary Solutions: Increasing prices for proprietary platforms are driving companies to explore alternatives like SUSE Virtualization to manage VMs and Kubernetes without incurring high licensing costs.
• Complexity in Managing Hybrid Workloads: Running containers and VMs on separate platforms creates operational challenges, inefficiencies, and potential security risks.
• Data Protection and Compliance: Ensuring  sensitive data across containers and VMs is protected and compliant is essential to avoid regulatory issues and maintain business continuity.
• Kubernetes Backup Complexity: Backing up workloads across multiple Kubernetes  clusters and environments remains a significant challenge.
• Difficult Migrations: Moving workloads between different Kubernetes distributions or storage solutions can be complex and time-consuming

The Joint Solution: CloudCasa and SUSE Rancher Prime

CloudCasa has introduced a new SUSE Rancher Prime Extension, integrating its capabilities directly into the SUSE Rancher Prime UI. This integration allows users to easily install and configure CloudCasa agents on Kubernetes clusters managed by SUSE Rancher Prime. Users can manage backup and restore operations as well as monitor backups directly from the SUSE Rancher Prime UI, simplifying backup management and ensuring data protection without leaving the platform. Together, this solution offers a  unified management experience, delivering consistent control across Kubernetes clusters regardless of their hosting environment.

Key Capabilities and Benefits:

• Multi-Cluster Management Across Clouds and On-Premises: Simplifies operations with unified backup and recovery management for Kubernetes clusters across hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge environments. SUSE Rancher Prime offers centralized management across these locations, and CloudCasa extends its data protection features across these clusters.
• Single Pane of Glass for VM and Container Management: Delivers a comprehensive backup solution supporting both SUSE Virtualization virtual machines and containerized workloads, ensuring complete protection across all workloads. Managing both VMs and containers from a single interface reduces operational complexity and increases efficiency.
• Application Mobility & Seamless Migration: Enables seamless migration and recovery between different Kubernetes distributions. This includes simplified transitions to RKE2, Longhorn storage, or other Kubernetes distributions like GKE, EKS, and AKS, reducing downtime and operational complexity. CloudCasa supports a wide range of Kubernetes distributions, ensuring a single pane of glass for managing backups and restores during migration. CloudCasa can back up workloads from RKE 1 and restore them directly to SUSE RKE 2 clusters, simplifying the transition.
• Enterprise-Grade Security, Compliance, and Governance: Delivers  regulatory compliance through encrypted, air-gapped, and immutable backups that protect against ransomware and data loss. CloudCasa also offers RBAC enforcement and compliance-ready recovery while SUSE Rancher Prime enforces RBAC and centralized security policies consistently across clusters.
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): CloudCasa is presented as a cost-effective solution for both VM and container backups, helping organizations reduce their overall data protection expenses. 
• Streamlined Operations: By integrating CloudCasa’s agent installation, backup monitoring, and policy management directly into the Rancher UI, the solution makes Kubernetes data protection more seamless and accessible.

Why SUSE Rancher Prime and CloudCasa Win Together

• When Kubernetes backups are complex and time-consuming, CloudCasa + SUSE deliver enterprise-grade protection with minimal operational overhead across  diverse environments.
• For organizations needing a better disaster recovery strategy for cloud-native apps, CloudCasa provides deep integration with Kubernetes for application-consistent backups and DR.
• If managing backups across multiple Rancher environments complicates migrations, CloudCasa provides complete protection of SUSE Rancher-specific resources and configurations, facilitating migrations to any Kubernetes cluster.
• To ensure consistency when moving between Rancher versions, CloudCasa offers a unified solution for both migration and protection of SUSE Rancher environments, reducing risk and downtime.
• For consistent application protection and portability/mobility, CloudCasa, being cloud and platform agnostic like SUSE Rancher Prime, allows for consistent protection using common policies, storage class mapping, and other techniques to restore or migrate applications reliably and cost-effectively across clusters and clouds.

Conclusion

SUSE and CloudCasa by Catalogic deliver a  powerful, cost-effective solution for Kubernetes data protection, disaster recovery, and migration. By combining SUSE’s management capabilities for Kubernetes and virtualization with CloudCasa’s purpose-built data protection platform, organizations can  ensure seamless protection of container and VM workloads, simplify critical migrations, and maintain operational resilience. With unified management, immutable backups, and flexible deployment options, the joint solution helps businesses streamline operations across hybrid cloud environments and  stay resilient in the face of evolving IT challenges.

To learn more contact us at isv-cosell@suse.com