Mesosphere staked out a new operational direction, announcing plans to resell Portworx’s cloud native storage products targeted at containerized applications. The move will combine Mesosphere’s automated compute service with Portworx’s automated storage platform.
The combined offering will use Mesosphere’s DC/OS container platform and Portworx’s PX-Enterprise cloud native data management platform. This will provide customers with access to high availability, snapshots, backup, encryption, and dynamic scheduling of data services at scale. Examples include running stateful applications across fault-domains; the ability to burst workloads to the cloud; and providing access to local storage for mission-critical or performance sensitive data services running on a hosted Kubernetes platform.
“By partnering with Portworx, we’re able to provide a comprehensive solution that closes the gap for stateful services currently missing from Kubernetes,” explained Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert, in an email. “We’re thrilled to formalize the relationship and further enable containerized and fast data applications with portability and ease.”
The two companies had previously worked on offering the Portworx PX-Enterprise product with external persistent volume support in DC/OS frameworks. That support included big data and fast data applications like Cassandra, Kafka, ElasticSearch, and HDFS.
Leibert noted the latest agreement was just “the beginning” of Mesosphere’s partnership with Portworx, though he was not ready to discuss other potential plans.
“Portworx’s persistent storage solution is unique, and our joint offering is unmatched at this time,” Leibert wrote. “That said, we cannot predict how the industry will shift and change in the coming years.”
Mesosphere Moves
The latest deal is the first reseller agreement for Mesosphere and highlights an ongoing evolution of the company’s efforts. While Mesosphere is still highly regarded as the platform of choice for large-scale container deployments, it has also begun to adjust operations in light of broader choices in the container market.
Mesosphere earlier this month updated its DC/OS container platform with deeper integration of the Kubernetes container orchestrator and other enhancements focused on edge and multi-cloud support. That move followed its announcement last year to support Kubernetes alongside its own Marathon container orchestrator within DC/OS.
Mesosphere CTO Tobi Knaup at that time said the move was about offering its customers more choices in terms of their container orchestration needs.
“It’s important for us to understand our target customers are usually the operations teams,” Knaup said. “These folks offer platforms for all the developers at a company sometimes serving up to 10,000 developers. They use a variety of software and can’t be limited to one option. Choice is very important.”
However, analysts have noted that Marathon does lean toward larger container deployments. Knaup said some of Mesosphere’s customers are running several clusters with up to 30,000 nodes in each cluster.
According to a survey conducted as part of an SDxCentral report on container and cloud orchestration, 64 percent of respondents said they were using Kubernetes, 36 percent said they were using Docker‘s Swarm, and 18 percent said they were using Mesosphere’s Marathon. The survey included the option for multiple answers.
Portworx Posture
For Portworx, the deal expands the reach of its enterprise-focused PX-Enterprise container storage platform. The enterprise version was launched in mid-2016, and supports Kubernetes and Marathon.
Portworx targets customers running stateful applications – like databases – in containers. It offers the ability to spin up storage controllers in container form to match the speed of container-based application creation. The product is an alternative to storage-area networking (SAN) and allows users to take advantage of storage in an ad hoc manner.
Portworx earlier this year partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on a reference configuration that uses Kubernetes to offer enterprises a quick way to deploy and manage stateful container workloads. The reference configuration combines HPE’s Synergy composable system as the basis for running Portworx’s PX-Enterprise storage platform using Kubernetes as the container orchestrator and scheduler.
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