DataCore Acquires MayaData to Expand Storage Portfolio

DataCore Software announced today it has acquired MayaData to add a container storage platform to its portfolio of software-defined storage (SDS) offerings.

Previously, DataCore was providing funding to MayaData along with forming technology licensing agreements that include transferring engineers to MayData and gaining seats on the company’s board. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

MayaData is best known for OpenEBS, an open source container storage platform that runs natively on Kubernetes. OpenEBS automates provisioning and replication of storage pods and is now being advanced as an open source project under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

DataCore CEO Dave Zabrowski said now that Kubernetes is being adopted by a wider range of enterprise IT organizations to run stateful applications, the time is right to bring MayaData into the fold of DataCore. Nevertheless, DataCore is committed to continuing to contribute to the OpenEBS project, he added.

As of the end of the third quarter 2021, OpenEBS is pulled more than 600,000 times a week, which represents a 300% increase over the last eight months, the company claims. Organizations that are running MayaData software in production environments include Bloomberg, Flipkart and Optoro.

DataCore now has a two-pronged approach to Kubernetes. In addition to OpenEBS, the rest of its portfolio of storage software can be connected to Kubernetes via the container storage interface (CSI) that was created by the Kubernetes community.

Kubernetes itself provides permanent storage mechanisms for containers based on Kubernetes persistent volumes (PV). This makes it possible to access data far beyond the lifespan of any given pod. Kubernetes volumes allow users to mount storage units to expand how much data they can share between nodes. Volumes are deleted when a pod hosting it shuts down. The permanent volume, however, is hosted on its own pod to ensure data remains accessible. Upon creation, the PV is bound to the pod that requested the persistent volume claim (PVC).

Until recently, however, there was a debate about the wisdom of deploying stateful applications on Kubernetes. Many IT teams preferred to only deploy stateless applications that stored data on external platforms outside of the Kubernetes cluster.

Proponents of stateful applications on Kubernetes clusters argue that this approach makes it easier to converge the management of compute and storage on the same platform.

A recent survey published by the Data on Kubernetes Community (DoKC) finds 70% of respondents are now running stateful applications on Kubernetes clusters, with another 20% saying they expect to see these types of workloads deployed on the platform. The survey also finds that 46% of respondents that are running stateful workloads have more than half of them running on Kubernetes clusters.

The battle for Kubernetes storage dominance is, of course, just beginning. The good news is enterprise IT teams have no shortage of options. The challenge now is determining which approach is better suited to the requirements of what will soon be a wide range of both stateful and stateless applications.

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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