StorageOS goes to market with persistent Docker container storage

Container storage specialist StorageOS has gained Docker certification and gone to public beta of its product, which allows persistent storage to be provided for containers that can be managed and optimised.

StorageOS is a software product that brokers and manages container storage requirements, sitting between the containers and back-end storage capacity that can be on servers or a storage array.

The product is downloadable from the Docker Store marketplace and deployed to server nodes. It allows rules to be set about where data is placed and policies to be run on disaster recovery requirements, data protection, service levels, encryption, and so on.

StorageOS also optimises storage, tracking where containers are running and ensuring storage remains as local as possible to keep latency down.

It aims to tackle the key weakness of storage for container environments – that container storage is not persistent.

That means that when containers cease running, whether for planned or unplanned reasons, storage is lost and not resumed when containers are restarted.

Containers are gaining popularity because of their ability to be deployed and scaled rapidly. Organisations can deploy a given number of containers to support a campaign launch, for example, then, if demand spikes, more containers can be added, effectively increasing the parallelised operation of the application.

These can also be in different locations, so some containers could be run in-house while additional capacity is run from a public cloud.

StorageOS CEO Chris Brandon said some financial services customers use containers to help with long-term data protection in the cloud where providers would not usually support encryption.

Here, the customer containerises data on-site, encrypts it, then uploads it to the cloud, so data is replicated across two sites with encryption maintained.

“Containers allow for rapid scaling and portability with quickly changing workloads,” said Brandon.

StorageOS can run on commodity hardware, on a virtualisation hypervisor, in public, private or hybrid clouds, in a container or on bare metal.

Brandon said StorageOS is built on the 64-bit Linux kernel, so any maximums in terms of addressable volumes and LUNs are those of that environment.

In June 2017, StorageOS will be available from within container orchestration software Kubernetes. ....................................................... ....................................................................................