Storage giant EMC has dipped its toe into the hot application container market, taking aim at one of the unresolved areas in this burgeoning technology: storage.
EMC announced libStorage, which the company describes as an open-source, platform-agnostic storage provisioning and orchestration framework for containers.
libStorage is a client that sits atop a storage array that can talk to container management platforms, allowing that storage system to interact with containers. EMC posted the code for libStorage on GitHub and made it available as a free download.
A blog post describing libStorage goes into more detail:
“One of the most critical challenges with container deployments is communication; while several container platforms may be running in an environment, each has its own language, requiring users to treat them as silos. libStorage provides centralised storage capabilities for a distributed, container-driven ecosystem, resulting in one storage language to speak with all container platforms and one common method of support. Using libStorage ensures that storage platforms no longer differentiate among containers, but provide choice and portability of applications across platforms.”
Storage remains a complicated aspect of managing application containers. There are a plethora of platforms on the market touching on a range of container management issues. Cluster managers like Docker Swarm and Kubernetes manage the creation of containers. Other platforms like Rancher provide an operating system designed to run with containers as well as a broader management platform. Portworx is a company that has focused on the networking and storage requirements of containers.
EMC is looking to ensure that its storage platforms are ready and able to handle container workloads.
libStorage emerged from EMC {code} a group within the storage giant that develops open source projects. Another EMC {code} component is Polly, an open source storage scheduler meant to integrate with Cloud Foundry, Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos.
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