International Data Corporation (IDC) today published an IDC Innovators report profiling four companies that offer persistent storage solutions for containerized applications in the enterprise. The four companies are: Diamanti, Portworx, Robin.io, and StorageOS.

Containers - a lighter weight, more portable alternative to virtual machines (VMs) for helping developers build, test, and deploy applications - are forecast to be deployed at high rates over the next several years. To enable the business requirements of these containerized applications, a combination of primary and secondary storage is needed. But traditional storage technologies aren't well suited to the needs of containerized environments that are more dense, dynamic, and require higher scalability.

To meet these needs, container-native and orchestration-aware software engines aggregate the underlying storage and expose it as software-defined devices. This allows IT administrators to take any cloud or on-premises storage and turn it into a single, shared clusterwide storage pool. These solutions create hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)-like systems. They can also sit atop of traditional HCI solutions to provide container-level granularity and cross-platform availability. As a result, storage vendors can now provide enterprise-grade storage services for containers and DevOps now enjoys container-native solutions for classic storage operations.

"Third-party solutions are needed - not only to manage application data storage but also to migrate that data across distributed nodes, enabling mobility, security, and backup, and disaster recovery capabilities," said Lucas Mearian, research manager, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies. "This is an emerging market segment, and at this point, there are a limited number of companies offering solutions. Prospective buyers should investigate each solution and determine which is most closely aligned with their containerization initiatives, use of on-premises or cloud services, and enterprise IT requirements."

The report, IDC Innovators: Containerized Application Storage Platforms, 2020 (IDC #US46800920), profiles four companies offering containerized application storage solutions. Each of these vendors provide a scalable platform that connects container applications to the underlying storage infrastructure as well as data protection and replication services.

• Diamanti combines an HCI appliance with a Kubernetes platform that includes integrated storage management to address the persistent storage needs of multicluster, multicloud environments.
• Portworx offers a suite of software products that provide dynamic storage provisioning, backup, data migration, and security for data in transit and at rest.
• Robin.io uses an application-focused approach that stores the container application and associated data together as a single entity, enabling users to automate and simplify several aspects of data management.
• StorageOS software aggregates underlying disk storage on a cluster of server nodes, each of which becomes the storage container that can be mounted to a virtual volume.