NTT Communications Corporation, the ICT solutions and international communications business within the NTT Group, its subsidiary NTTPC Communications (NTTPC) and Rancher Labs, a provider of container management software, announced today that they have agreed today to collaborate in providing enterprises with container services for the unified storage of data and objects. A private container service will be implemented in NTT Com's Enterprise Cloud in October and a public container service will be implemented in NTTPC's WebARENA cloud by December 2017.

Features of private-container service for enterprises

• Manage user interface via web
  
  The Rancher container management platform enables customers to easily manage and operate containers, allowing them to:
  • Deploy multiple Docker clusters
  • Scale containers and hosts
  • Configure and deploy infrastructure services
  • Monitor containers and hosts
• Catalog function
  
  By leveraging the diverse set of infrastructure services available to the community, customers can easily build systems comprising multiple containers. Customers can easily select, configure and deploy infrastructure services such as storage, networking and load balancers through the Rancher interface, making it easy to replicate and deploy custom environments.

• Integration with Enterprise Cloud
  
  Rancher environments created in Enterprise Cloud's virtual server can be integrated with a variety of Enterprise Cloud options, including databases.

NTT Com Group and Rancher Labs will verify and evaluate the service on the IoT platform of a major manufacturer starting this month. Container services for midsize to large enterprises are expected to be delivered as a multi-tenant cloud service in December 2017.

Background
As part of the ongoing digital transformation of enterprise systems, the development and verification of container software is gaining momentum. Until now, however, potential users have been apprehensive about the operation and management of container environments and related security issues. In response, NTT Com and NTTPC will offer a private container as a service that enables enterprises to quickly and easily establish cloud-based container environments via Rancher container management software. NTT Com and NTTPC will provide support for the service, with technical assistance from Rancher Labs. In addition, this collaboration is the first time Rancher Labs is providing an MSP (Managed Service Provider) licensing model to a cloud service provider in Japan.