StorageOS makes hybrid cloud container storage platform generally available

StorageOS has made its container storage product generally available. The product is largely centred on operations via the Kubernetes container orchestration platform and can operate on-premise, in the cloud and in hybrid cloud environments.

StorageOS is a software product for managing container storage requirements. It sits between containers and storage capacity that can be on-premise or in the cloud, and provides a pool of storage for containers in Kubernetes, Red Hat Openshift and Docker, with features to automate and protect storage for containerised applications.

With a minimum three-node (server) cluster, StorageOS provides a rules engine that integrates with labels in Kubernetes to define storage, such as the type of disk, and to apply access controls.

StorageOS can accommodate a number of compute and storage architectures, and can run on-premise, in the cloud, or a combination of both.

Storage types supported include scale-out, operating with local disk like hyper-converged infrastructure appliances; cloud, in which StorageOS runs in cloud instances and/or with storage in the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud platforms; on VMware, where it makes use of VMDK storage; and on storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) external arrays.

“StorageOS allows the customer to use any commodity storage or cloud storage and supports any underlying architecture and infrastructure. It’s the same configuration on-prem or in the cloud,” said StorageOS founder and CEO Chris Brandon.

The product enables administrators to create and provision volumes for containers, provides visibility of the storage pool, allows container storage performance to be tracked, delivers quality of service at volume level and live movement between storage volumes, for example to move containers to better-performing storage.

Key target markets cited by Brandon are financial, media and retail customers that need to rapidly deploy and scale applications, particularly customer-facing ones such as online banking, e-commerce and video streaming.

He said many customers had plumped for containers over virtual server approaches: “Lots of our customers have gone to VM [virtual machine] environments but not been able to scale with them. Containers can be deployed quickly and scale easily.”

A free version of StorageOS is available on the Docker Hub and will be available on the Red Hat container catalogue “soon”, said Brandon.