RackWare SWIFT and
SUSE Rancher Prime
Building the Enterprise Kubernetes Future
SUSE Rancher Prime is an enterprise Kubernetes management platform that gives organizations a unified control plane for deploying, securing, and operating Kubernetes clusters across on-premises infrastructure, public cloud, and edge environments. It supports any CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution and provides centralized policy enforcement, role-based access control, and multi-cluster visibility from a single interface.
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RackWare SWIFT operates as a complementary layer within that environment, handling the data mobility and protection work that SUSE Rancher itself doesn't perform. Where Rancher manages the operational state of clusters and the applications running in them, SWIFT manages what happens to those workloads when they need to move, be protected, or be recovered.
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SWIFT installs outside your managed clusters, on a standard Linux VM or server that has network connectivity to both source and destination clusters. It interacts with SUSE Rancher environments through standard Kubernetes APIs and RBAC, requiring no modifications to running applications, no SSH access to worker nodes, and no reconfiguration of production workloads. From Rancher's perspective, SWIFT is an authorized API client operating within the access controls you've already defined.
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When SWIFT performs a sync or replication job, it discovers the full application dependency graph including namespaces, pods, persistent volumes, services, ingress rules, secrets, and ConfigMaps, and captures that state through a combination of Kubernetes metadata collection and storage snapshots.
For each persistent volume, SWIFT selects the appropriate snapshot mechanism automatically, whether that's a CSI-standard API, a cloud-provider-native snapshot service, or a storage-vendor-specific approach. Data transfer happens through short-lived agent pods (called TRAI-Pods) that SWIFT launches, uses for the transfer, and then removes when the job is complete. Nothing accumulates inside your clusters between operations.
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On arrival at the destination SWIFT reconstructs the complete application state and runs automated health checks to confirm that services are running, endpoints are reachable, and storage is correctly attached. SUSE Rancher Prime then governs that destination cluster with the same policies and access controls as the source, so the operational posture of the migrated or recovered workload is consistent from day one.
RackWare and SUSE Resources
Broad Compliance Support
RackWare SWIFT is FedRAMP and IL5 compliant, making it suitable for government agency deployments and highly regulated enterprise environments including financial services, healthcare, and defense sectors.
VMware Tanzu Exits to SUSE Rancher Prime and RKE2
Enterprises invested in VMware Tanzu face rising costs, shifting roadmaps, and complex migrations that can break stateful applications if approached without the right tooling. But the challenge isn't just getting off a platform, it's arriving on the next one with production-ready resilience already in place.
SUSE Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE2) is a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution that focuses on security and compliance within regulated industries and the U.S. Federal Government sector. It provides defaults and configuration options that allow clusters to pass the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark with minimal operator intervention, enables FIPS 140-2 compliance, and is regularly scanned for CVEs using trivy in its build pipeline.
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SWIFT automates the migration of stateful Kubernetes workloads and lands them cleanly lands them cleanly on RKE2 clusters in your SUSE Rancher environment, without manual refactoring or data loss. Disaster recovery is established on the target environment before migration begins, so organizations arrive at cutover with a tested, recoverable state already in place. And rather than requiring permanent standby infrastructure, SWIFT provisions DR clusters on demand, making rehearsable failover practical and cost-effective at enterprise scale.
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SUSE Rancher Prime governs the destination from day one, enforcing unified security policies and providing the multi-cluster management plane that ties everything together across any CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution, in any environment.
This migration results in a supported platform with unified governance, robust security and compliance features, and a strong resilience and DR posture.
Benefits of RackWare SWIFT for SUSE Rancher
Any-to-Any Kubernetes Migration
SWIFT migrates workloads across any Kubernetes distribution without manual refactoring. Source and target platforms can be any combination of on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments.
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Full Application State Preservation
Migrations and replications capture the complete application footprint: namespaces, persistent volumes (PVs and PVCs), secrets, ConfigMaps, services, ingress rules, and RBAC policies.
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Continuous Backup and Synchronization
SWIFT maintains ongoing synchronization between source and target clusters, enabling incremental backups that reduce recovery point objectives without requiring full re-replications.
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​On-Demand DR Cluster Provisioning
Rather than maintaining a permanently running standby cluster, SWIFT provisions DR environments on demand, eliminating the ongoing infrastructure cost of idle standby resources.
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Rehearsable Failover for Stateful Workloads
SWIFT supports scheduled and on-demand DR rehearsals that validate the full recovery of stateful applications, including databases, message queues, AI/ML feature stores, and other persistent workloads.
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Transient Agent Architecture
SWIFT uses short-lived agent pods (TRAI-Pods) that are launched, used for data transfer, and then automatically cleaned up after each sync or replication job.