WW Container Data Management 2023 Vendor Assessment

This market report, published in November 2023, was written by Johnny Yu, Phil Goodwin and Greg Macatee, analysts at IDC Corp.

IDC MarketScape:
Worldwide Container Data Management 2023 Vendor Assessment

IDC opinion
As organizations increasingly adopt Kubernetes to enable faster application delivery, application portability, and other benefits, they must also adopt tools that can help them manage and maintain the infrastructure that supports containerized applications.

The emergence of cloud-native storage and cloud-native data protection products made it patently clear that storage administrators must treat applications running in container and Kubernetes environments differently from those running in physical and virtual ones. Tasks such as viewing storage resource usage, provisioning storage resources for applications to run and store their data, backing up and restoring these data, and quickly failing over the application into a new environment, should disaster strike, all require new tools specifically tuned for container architecture.

Traditional storage categorizes storage management and data management tasks separately. Although most physical and virtual storage platforms have native data management features such as data migration and backup and recovery, there exists an entirely separate data replication and protection software market designed to work with a range of storage platforms to offer more robust data management capabilities. IDC believes the container market is not yet at a point where this separation is necessary, nor are most customers actively seeking it.

Instead, physical storage and VM experts are finding themselves responsible for supporting container and Kubernetes environments. They’re not container experts, nor should they need to understand the technology to the same level as application developers, but they need tools that let them perform the same support tasks for applications running in containers as the ones they’re using for applications running in their organizations’ traditional environments. The better the product or platform is at making the tasks between traditional and container environments analogous, the greater the value-add for organizations that are running containerized applications in production.

IDC Marketscape vendor inclusion criteria
This IDC MarketScape centers around products that provide data and storage management capabilities for containers (shortened to just “container data management” for brevity). This is not to be confused with products such as container schedulers and orchestrators, which are responsible for the creation and dissolution of the container environments themselves. Container data management products are instead responsible for what are generally categorized as data management capabilities and storage management capabilities.

Participating products in this IDC MarketScape all meet the following criteria:

• Product must be focused on containers and cannot be an existing data management product for traditional environments that requires a plug-in or add-on to extend its capabilities into container environments.
• Product provides either natively or through integrations with its partner ecosystem data management capabilities for container environments. Such capabilities include point-in-time data backup and recovery, backup of cluster components and metadata, data and application migration, and DR).
• Product provides either natively or through integrations with its partner ecosystem storage management capabilities for container environments. Such capabilities include storage provisioning for containerized applications and persistent data that those applications may depend on, monitoring of storage resource consumption, storage scaling and optimization, and security.

Notably, this IDC MarketScape takes into consideration not only the individual participating product but also what possible container data management solution can be built using the product and its partners. This expands participants’ areas of differentiation and allows each to showcase their unique value.

Advice for technology buyers
IDC does not expect any one product to be the perfect solution for every organization. Container data management vendors differentiate themselves in a variety of ways, and a solution that is perfect for one organization could be suboptimal for another.

Here are some key points to consider when evaluating the right vendor for your organization:

• Consider your own organization s level of container and Kubernetes expertise. Some vendors have extremely robust and highly configurable products, but organizations need enough know-how to take advantage of these advanced features. Some vendors provide container and Kubernetes help beyond product support, such as by offering consulting services or fostering a user community via forums and official Discord and Slack channels.
• Know your starting point, but plan to scale. Find products that match where you are on your container and Kubernetes journey, and pay attention to how well those products scale. Some products are complete, out-of-the-box solutions, while others are tuned for organizations that have already made investments in container technology.
• Select products that align with your container adoption plan. Many organizations are containerizing their legacy applications, but many also have critical applications that must stay running on VMs. Similarly, some organizations use open source Velero to protect their container environments and want to continue to use it as they run more containerized applications.
• Pay attention to what container management platforms a product supports. While Red Hat OpenShift is widely adopted, managed Kubernetes services from the three major public clouds and other Kubernetes distributions also see use.

This IDC MarketScape highlights what we believe are the most important criteria when evaluating a container data management product, but it is not intended to be a buyer’s guide. Instead, readers should use this document to identify strengths, weaknesses, and key points of differentiation between products in this market to narrow down the list of vendors that work best for them.