The market for cloud native storage is growing at a rapid pace. As enterprises embrace Kubernetes as the preferred container orchestrator and the platform vendors build hybrid cloud offerings based on Kubernetes, the demand for container native storage offerings increases.
To understand the market evolution and the need for container native storage platforms, refer to my previous article.
Here are 5 startups that are making a difference with their cloud native storage products:
1. Maya Data
Maya Data is the founder of an open source storage project called OpenEBS which delivers container attached storage to microservices-based applications. The volumes provisioned by OpenEBS run in containers that live close to the services that consume data. Each volume has a dedicated storage controller that increases the agility and granularity of persistent storage operations of the stateful applications.
OpenEBS adds an abstraction layer that makes cloud native applications portable. Data is always written to the OpenEBS layer which acts as the data abstraction layer. This architecture enables the portability of applications by avoiding vendor lock-in.
OpenEBS supports operations that include synchronous replication, snapshots and clones, backup and restore along with the integration with Prometheus for tracking metrics.
Maya Data provides commercial support for services for implementing OpenEBS. The MayaData Data Agility Platform (MDAP) is available in SaaS and on-premises versions.
Recently, OpenEBS was accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as the Sandbox Project which is an entry point for early-stage projects.
2. Portworx
Portworx is a Bay Area-based startup that solves the five most common problems DevOps teams encounter when running stateful services in production: persistence, high availability, data automation, security, and support for multiple data stores and infrastructure.
Portworx aims to bring traditional storage operations to cloud native environments. The platform is tightly integrated with Kubernetes to deliver familiar operations and workflow to DevOps teams. The storage platform supports cloud-based block storage services such as Amazon EBS, Google Compute Engine Persistent Disks, Azure Storage along with traditional NAS and SAN offerings. Portworx creates container native storage pool from the underlying sources which decouples applications from proprietary implementations.
With a simple installation process, Portworx deploys as DaemonSet in Kubernetes making itself available on every node of the cluster. Customers can use the familiar kubectl CLI to perform operations such as the creation of Storage Class, Persistent Volume Controllers (PVC), Persistent Volumes (PV), and Snapshots. The platform supports migrating entire applications, including data, between clusters in a single data center or cloud, or between clouds, with a single kubectl command.
PX-DR, an advanced capability, extends the data protection included in PX-Store with Zero RPO Disaster Recovery for data centers in a metropolitan area as well as continuous backups across the WAN for an even greater level of protection.
Portworx is one of the early movers in the market with impressive clientele that includes GE, Comcast, Verizon, T-Mobile among others. It's storage platform matured to address enterprise use cases and scenarios.
3. Reduxio
Started in 2012 as a data management company, Reduxio has recently pivoted to become a microservices-based storage and data platform for stateful applications. Reduxio’s cloud data platform for Kubernetes pairs high performance software-defined container-native storage and data management with data mobility to enable customers to build a single data cloud for their applications across all their infrastructure, anywhere.
Magellan, the cloud native data platform attempts to become the defacto storage layer for applications running on any cloud. According to the company, the Magellan Cloud Data Platform combines new patent-pending IP for data mobility that allows enterprises to unify multiple infrastructure islands into a single data cloud for applications with proven data management capabilities in a microservices-based platform.
Reduxio showcases its cloud data platform at KubeCon-Barcelona 2019. Currently, Reduxio is offering Magellan to a group of select customers in an early beta program, with general availability expected for Fall 2019.
4. Robin.io
Robin Systems was started in 2013 as a container orchestration platform for big data workloads. It moved away from building its own orchestration engine to focus on delivering a hyper-converged Kubernetes infrastructure.
According to Robin, hyper-converged Kubernetes is a software-defined application orchestration framework that combines containerized storage, networking, compute (Kubernetes), and the application management layer into a single system.
Apart from hyper-converged Kubernetes, the company also sells Robin Storage, a purpose-built container-native storage solution that brings advanced data management capabilities to Kubernetes. It provides automated provisioning, point-in-time snapshots, backup and recovery, application cloning, QoS guarantee, and multi-cloud migration for stateful applications on Kubernetes.
Robin Storage integrates with Google Kubernetes Engine and Red Hat OpenShift. It is available as an operator on Red Hat’s Operator Hub. Robin is a launch partner for Anthos - the hybrid cloud platform from Google.
5. StorageOS
Founded in May 2015, StorageOS is a London-based startup that builds a software-based distributed storage platform providing persistent storage for containerized applications.
Like its competitors, StorageOS creates an abstraction layer of the underlying storage services. By creating up to six replicas of data, StorageOS ensures higher availability and rapid failover.
With its native integration with Kubernetes, users can request storage volumes using Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs), monitor volumes and add and remove nodes.
Deployed as a container within the environment, StorageOS sits above the infrastructure (bare metal, VMs, public or private cloud) and container runtime/orchestrator to create a highly available storage pool from any available block device or filesystem. Volumes are dynamically allocated space in a pool based on placement rules. StorageOS then replicates between nodes for high availability and between clusters and location for disaster recovery.
StorageOS can be integrated with Kubernetes running on major cloud platforms including AWS, Azure and GCP.
