Reduxio Rises to Container Storage Challenge

Reduxio is gearing up to deliver an integrated data and storage management platform for cloud-native applications based on containers this fall.

Jacob Cherian, chief marketing officer for Reduxio, says the company is now providing early access to the Magellan Cloud Data Platform optimized for Kubernetes environments.

Cherian says most enterprise IT organizations are just now starting to deploy stateful applications based on containers in production environments. Reduxio has yet to describe how the Magellan Cloud Data Platform works, but Cherian says it will combine traditional storage management capabilities with data management tools that will address everything from data mobility and data deduplication to data protection.

Reduxio Magellan

Cherian says the shift to the cloud is forcing organizations to rethink not only data storage and management but also the relationship between DevOps and traditional DataOps processes. As organizations move to build modern microservices-based applications based on Kubernetes, developers of those applications will need to access data without always waiting for a storage or database administrator to create a data pipeline. At the same time, the Magellan Cloud Data Platform will enable IT organizations to apply policies to control what data gets accessed by whom at any given time, he says.

Reduxio is hardly the first storage vendor to recognize the need to support stateful applications running on Kubernetes that need access to some form of persistent storage. Gartner has forecasted that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized workloads in production, up from less than 30% today. It’s worth noting that even when organizations have already deployed containerized workloads, the percentage of those workloads that make up their IT environment is still relatively slight.

As Kubernetes is adopted more widely across public and private cloud computing environments, Reduxio is betting IT organizations will look to deploy a container storage platform that can run anywhere Kubernetes is deployed. While it’s generally expected that transition will occur, the rate at which Kubernetes will reach enough critical mass to provide the foundation for a truly hybrid cloud computing environment remains to be seen.

In the meantime, organizations of all sizes are under pressure to modernize their data management processes. Many IT departments are expected to be able to expose massive amounts of data to machine learning algorithms embedded with artificial intelligence applications built primarily using containers. Those applications run across graphical processor units and traditional x86 servers and need to access a common pool of persistent storage. The probability that IT organizations will be looking for new data storage platforms to achieve that goal is high.

Of course, the same issues are apparent to incumbent providers of data storage systems. The degree to which those vendors can—or are willing to—optimize those environments for containerized applications remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, however, it’s apparent the contest for dominance over the next generation of cloud-native storage systems will be nothing less than fierce.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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