Longhorn 1.7: Distributed Block Storage Reliability and Performance

Introduction

Storage failures are the kind you feel for weeks: replica rebuild storms, backups that can’t restore cleanly, or latency that slowly creeps up until every stateful workload is “mysteriously” slower. That’s why Longhorn releases are as much about operational stability as they are about feature count.

Longhorn 1.7, released on October 31, 2025, strengthens the core reliability story—replication behavior, backup/restore workflows, performance improvements, and data protection features that matter when you’re running stateful workloads in production on Kubernetes.

Why this matters in practice

• Durability under churn: better replica sync and rebuild behavior reduces risk during node maintenance and failures.
• Backups you can trust: faster and more predictable backup/restore operations support real DR drills.
• Performance predictability: IOPS/latency improvements help keep storage from becoming the bottleneck.

Replication Improvements

• Enhanced replication provides better data durability and availability through improved replication algorithms and faster replica synchronization.
• Synchronous replication improvements enable better consistency guarantees with reduced latency through optimized replication protocols.
• Asynchronous replication enhancements provide better performance for remote replication with improved bandwidth utilization and compression.
• Replication factor flexibility enables dynamic adjustment of replication factors based on workload requirements and data criticality.

Backup Enhancements

1. Backup performance improvements reduce backup time by up to 50% through parallel backup processing and optimized data transfer.
2. Incremental backup support enables efficient backup of only changed data, reducing backup storage requirements by up to 80%.
3. Backup scheduling improvements provide flexible backup scheduling with cron expressions, retention policies, and automated backup verification.
4. Restore capabilities enable faster restore operations with parallel restore processing and selective volume restoration.

Performance Optimizations

• IOPS improvements increase input/output operations per second by up to 40% through better I/O scheduling and caching strategies.
• Latency reductions minimize storage access latency through optimized data paths and better connection management.
• Throughput enhancements improve data transfer rates by up to 35% through better network utilization and compression.
• Scaling improvements enable reliable operation with larger storage volumes and higher I/O workloads.

Integration Options

1. Kubernetes integration improvements provide seamless integration with Kubernetes CSI and dynamic provisioning workflows.
2. CSI enhancements enable better Container Storage Interface integration with support for snapshot, cloning, and volume expansion.
3. Monitoring integration provides comprehensive metrics and alerts for storage health, performance, and capacity with Prometheus and Grafana.
4. Backup storage integration supports multiple backup storage backends including S3, NFS, and cloud storage services.

Data Protection Features

• Snapshot management improvements provide better snapshot creation, scheduling, and retention with automatic snapshot cleanup.
• Volume cloning enhancements enable faster volume cloning with copy-on-write mechanisms for efficient storage usage.
• Disaster recovery capabilities provide automated disaster recovery workflows with cross-cluster backup and restore.
• Data integrity verification automatically validates data integrity with checksums and automatic repair capabilities.

Getting Started

# Install Longhorn using kubectl
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/longhorn/longhorn/v1.7.0/deploy/longhorn.yaml

# Create a PersistentVolume
kubectl apply -f pvc.yaml

Example PVC:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: longhorn-volv-pvc
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  storageClassName: longhorn
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

Summary

Longhorn 1.7 continues to provide enterprise-grade distributed block storage, making it easier to manage persistent storage for stateful workloads on Kubernetes with high reliability and performance.