Maxta MxSP dons its Red Hat for container storage

Maxta MxSP hyper-converged infrastructure is expanding integration with Red Hat. The software-only vendor has added support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which is built on Red Hat Container Native Storage with GlusterFS file system.

The move is designed to ease migration of containers from VMware vSphere to Red Hat Virtualization. The Maxta MxSP platform supports both hypervisors on a single platform.

Maxta shared storage consists of the vendor’s distributed file system and integrated data services, including automated snapshots and cloning for rapid recovery.  According to a Maxta spec sheet, Red Hat deployments require a minimum of three compute servers to maintain a quorum.

Maxta CEO Yoram Novick said Maxta file system provides capabilities for abstracted environments.

“The key capabilities of persistent storage are data integrity and performance. Maxta file system has strong checksums for both data and metadata to address one aspect of data integrity. Maxta also makes copies of all data elements across two or more different servers to protect against server, disk and flash failures,” plus synchronous replication.

For data protection, Maxta supports unlimited automated snapshots and clones for rapid recovery of applications.

Hyper-converged systems consist of a standard server hardware that combines compute, network, storage and virtualization resources in one box. Unlike most HCI vendors, Maxta MxSP is sold only as software, although customers can opt to get MxSP reference architecture from major server vendors.

Maxta has tried to separate itself from other HCI vendors by claiming to eliminate application siloes. A typical HCI stack usually supports one application, whereas Maxta MxSP allows multiple applications to run on a single cluster.

Container adoption is on the rise as solutions have emerged for issues related to persistent storage and data protection. Enterprises are using containers for selected application development to offset costs and management issues associated with large virtual machine farms.

Based on Linux variants, a container represents a slimmed-down alternative to a VM, allowing applications to be swapped between any underlying storage.

Instead of a guest of the full host operating system, a container requires only the slice of code needed to execute its dedicated microservices. Containers are also able to be rapidly deployed at large scale, with the Google Kubernetes Engine starting to assert itself as the preferred orchestration framework.

To date, the dominant practice is for enterprises to launch containers inside a VM. Maxta claims its OpenShift cloud infrastructure eliminates the necessity of separate abstraction layers by allowing containers to run natively without the need of a VM.

Maxta’s OpenShift support follows Red Hat integration in September 2017 for the VMware Escape Pod configuration, aimed at companies that want to reduce or eliminate VMware licensing fees for managing VMs. Novick said Maxta is monitoring customer demand to support  Microsoft Hyper-V.