Robin.io Launches Free-For-Life, Full-Featured ‘Express’ Edition of Robin Cloud Native Storage for Kubernetes

Robin.io announced enhancements to Robin Cloud Native Storage for Kubernetes and the immediate availability of Robin Express, a full-featured, free-for-life edition.

Robin Express complements the company’s enterprise-focused offering, Robin Enterprise, which offers 24×7 enterprise support, unlimited node and storage capacity, and true “per-node-hour,” consumption-based pricing.

“In launching the Express edition of Robin Cloud Native Storage, we’re doing something truly novel: we’re delivering all the features of our product in our free offering, for life,” said Partha Seetala, founder and CEO at Robin.io. “Most companies give customers a scaled-back version of the product to test drive and then try to charge them when they want to try other features, or they offer a trial of the product for a limited time. Although we are limiting the capacity to 5 nodes and 5 TB, we’re not blocking any features, and we’re providing access for life. We want our users to experience all the benefits Robin Cloud Native Storage has to offer. When their organizational needs scale to enterprise level, we’re confident the power of our solution and our low-cost, consumption-based pricing structure will make the move to our Enterprise edition a no-brainer.”

Robin Cloud Native Storage is a purpose-built, container-native storage solution that brings advanced data management capabilities to Kubernetes. It is a CSI-compliant block storage solution with bare-metal performance that seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes-native administrative tooling such as Kubectl, Helm Charts, and Operators through standard APIs.

Robin Cloud Native Storage recently added multi-cloud portability for complex stateful applications, launched on RedHat OpenShift Marketplace, was named IDC Innovator for containerized storage, and was recognized in the GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes storage as a leader and outperformer.

“Out of the 20 Kubernetes storage solutions we reviewed, we ranked Robin.io among three leaders, owing to its innovative and application-focused approach to Kubernetes data storage and management,” said Enrico Signoretti, senior data storage analyst, GigaOm. “The Robin.io solution differentiates on its application management capability. It enables the user to automate and simplify several aspects of application deployment, data management, and protection while providing better quality of service (QoS) and disaster recovery options.”

Stateful Applications on Kubernetes are on the Rise
Popular databases and data-centric applications such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, MariaDB, Cassandra, Elasticsearch and many more are increasingly being containerized and moved to Kubernetes-managed environments, giving rise to a need for storage and data management solutions that can address the unique needs of stateful applications on Kubernetes. 

“Robin Cloud Native Storage works with any workload on any Kubernetes-based platform and on any cloud,” said Seetala. “With capabilities for storing, taking snapshots, backing up, cloning, migrating and securing data-all with the simplest of commands-Robin Cloud Native Storage offers developers and DevOps teams a super simple yet highly performant tool for quickly deploying and managing their enterprise workloads on Kubernetes.” 

Highlight capabilities of Robin Cloud Native Storage include:

• Bare-metal storage performance with high availability
• Application-consistent snapshots to recover easily from user errors
• Application-consistent backups to recover easily from system failures
• Thin clones to collaborate faster across teams
• Multicloud portability to easily migrate entire applications across clouds

Today’s major release version of Robin Cloud Native Storage features these enhancements:

• Data management for Helm Charts: Helm is the most popular package manager and deployment mechanism on Kubernetes.  With Robin, you can now easily snapshot, backup, and migrate an entire Helm release as a single entity
• Data locality (compute-storage affinity) for performance-sensitive workloads
• Affinity and Anti-affinity policies to support the availability needs of stateful applications that rely on distributed databases and big data platforms
• Consumption based pricing for Robin Enterprise: Pay only for what you use