Mesosphere to Resell Portworx Storage Software for Containers
The march to make containers a foundational element of stateful applications across the enterprise got a boost this week with Mesosphere announcing it will resell PX-Enterprise storage software from Portworx.
The agreement extends an existing technology alliance that has resulted in the two companies sharing several joint customers, including including GE Digital, Verizon, NIO, athenahealth and Beco Inc. Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert says success of the alliance is indicative of just how much progress is now being made in terms of deploying stateful applications based on containers in production environments.
The decision to resell PX-Enterprise comes on the heels of a Mesosphere move to make Kubernetes available as an alternative to the Marathon container orchestration engine Mesosphere embeds in the DC/OS framework. Regardless of the container orchestration engine employed, Liebert says DC/OS provides the platform through which container applications can dynamically access multiple data sources, including big data services enabled by databases such as Cassandra and middleware such as Kafka, ElasticSearch and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Mesosphere is now seeing customers building containerized applications on top of data lakes that scale as high as 120 petabytes, Leibert notes.
Michael Ferranti, vice president of product marketing for Portworx, says PX-Enterprise complements that effort by not only providing access to persistent storage, but also all the support for snapshots, backup, encryption and scheduling that enterprise IT organizations require before deploying any application in a production environment.
While the agreement between Mesosphere and Portworx is not exclusive, the fact that Mesosphere is reselling PX-Enterprise means IT organizations can rely on Mesosphere to provide support for persistent storage software alongside DC/OS.
Thus far, containers have been associated with stateless applications. But as enterprise IT organizations become more comfortable with containers, there’s been a significant increase in the number of stateful applications being deployed using containers.
At the same time, progress on the development of a standard Container Storage Interface (CSI) is giving more organizations confidence in a de facto industry standard designed to prevent organizations from getting locked into a specific storage platform.
Mesosphere is positioning DC/OS as a platform that makes containers more accessible to enterprise IT organizations within the context of a private cloud they can deploy on-premises, at the network edge or in a third-party hosting facility or public cloud. To facilitate that transition, Mesosphere has developed a series of templates and references architectures for deploying containers alongside DC/OS across a range of horizontal and vertical industry use cases Leibert says.
Increased use of stateful applications is forcing the issue of making highly dynamic containers environments easier to set up and manage. As a rule, that requires a lot more than simply being able to stand up a Kubernetes cluster. Enterprise IT organizations require a modern platform designed from the ground up to manage the entire container application life cycle.
