SUSE has announced the release of Longhorn 1.1 which allows DevOps teams to manage persistent data volumes in any Kubernetes environment while bringing an enterprise-grade but vendor neutral approach to cloud-native storage.

With this latest update, Rancher users can build additional resilience into their edge environments with ARM64 support, new self-healing capabilities, and increased performance visibility provided by Longhorn 1.1.

Longhorn 1.1 extends Kubernetes-native storage capabilities to support edge deployments. It’s designed to help teams store data reliably within even the most hostile and resource-constrained environments. It also comes with support for ARM64 – one of the most requested features from the community.

Longhorn now offers ‘ReadWriteMany’ support across containers, giving developers an efficient persistent storage solution that enables volumes to be read and written across multiple containers at any time. Unlike ‘ReadWriteOnce’ methodologies, Longhorn 1.1 allows teams to share volume storage between different paths on different nodes.

Longhorn 1.1 brings better insights and functionality within an organization’s storage infrastructure. With new integrated support for Prometheus baked in, users now have real-time metrics of their storage health (monitoring, resource usage, tracking, etc.). With this support for Prometheus, users have a much more detailed view of cluster performance. Finally, with new support for CSI Snapshotter, users can create/restore backups via ‘kubectl’.

Another new arrival with Longhorn 1.1 is enhanced node maintenance capabilities. Longhorn now supports Kubernetes drain operations to aid users with the safe performance of node maintenance. Longhorn 1.1 also features the ability to recognize the existing disks on a new node, which provides a better operational environment for Cloud Providers.

A new Data Locality feature has been introduced with Longhorn 1.1 to increase resilience in unstable network conditions (e.g., in edge scenarios).

Existing users of Rancher can install Longhorn directly from Rancher’s app catalog. Longhorn is also free to download and use, and customers looking for support can purchase a premium support model with the same SLAs provided through SUSE Support Services.