ClusterHQ’s Ecosystem Includes 4 Big Storage Companies

ClusterHQ announced that its storage partner ecosystem has expanded to include four of the top five leaders in enterprise storage: Dell, Inc., EMC Corporation, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NetApp, Inc.

The most recent additions include, Dell, HPE, Kaminario Technologies, Ltd and PMC-Sierra, Inc., growing the program to include a total of 12 of the biggest and most innovative names in enterprise storage. Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and Nexenta Systems, Inc., who joined the ClusterHQ storage partner program in June, have released their Flocker storage drivers.

Joint customers can use ClusterHQ’s open source Flocker container data volume manager with their hardware-based or software-defined storage (SDS) solution of choice and any of the container management tools, including Docker, Mesosphere and Kubernetes to create portable container-level storage for Docker. With these capabilities, users can resolve data and storage roadblocks that stand in the way of enterprise container adoption.

“With the explosion of the Docker ecosystem, we are excited to bring stateful, open-source, container technology for storage through our Flocker OpenStack Cinder driver,” said Rob Strechay, director of product management for storage, HPE. “ClusterHQ is making it simple for Hewlett Packard Enterprise to enable customer adoption of Docker with our HPE 3PAR StoreServ and StoreVirtual storage technology.“

ClusterHQ also announced a Storage Profiles feature in Flocker, available, that enables users to take better advantage of the capabilities built into storage arrays. A Flocker user can choose from a menu of common storage options when creating a data volume, optimizing storage for their container-based application. With Flocker Storage Profiles, a Flocker driver developer can create distinct profile options for their storage system – for example, gold and bronze – that designate different options available when a user creates a volume, such as SSD (gold) or spinning disk (bronze). Previously users could specify only volume size. Drivers for Amazon EBS and Dell will take advantage of these profiles, with other drivers being updated in the coming months.

In addition to storage partners and additional features, Rancher, a software platform for deploying a private container service, has announced it will integrate Flocker into the Rancher service catalogue, enabling a one-click installation of Flocker into an existing Rancher deployment.

“ClusterHQ has established the container data management category in a big way and with the addition of HPE and Dell to the program we support more enterprise storage environments than any other related product for containers,” said Mark Davis, CEO, ClusterHQ. “The community has responded very positively to Flocker, and the availability of these sophisticated storage options for Docker is opening the door for new enterprise use cases enabled by the production readiness of containers.“

Any company or community that wants its storage backend to work with Docker, Kubernetes or Mesosphere can build a driver for Flocker, making it possible to create container-based applications using a variety of new or previously installed storage solutions.