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Red Hat OpenShift Storage rides wave of container momentum
Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage (OCS) now part of IBM Spectrum Discover catalog and focuses on bringing containers into production infrastructure.
The latest version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage includes support for external Kubernetes clusters, as well as a tie-in to IBM Watson analytics.
Red Hat OCS is integrated with Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform, a suite of open source tools for building cloud applications. The platform is based on Ceph software-defined storage to support block, file and object protocols, although companies can run other storage behind it.
OCS 4.5 reduces the need to scrub AI data in preparation for processing or to transform it for new use cases. Integration in the IBM Spectrum Discover catalog allows AI data to be ingested rapidly for IBM Watson. IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion.
Integrated virtualization platform
Enterprises use containers to avoid data gravity associated with traditional batch processing. The emergence of Kubernetes also spurred increased adoption of containers for virtualized applications.
Persistent storage is necessary to support stateful containers. Nearly 75% of organizations run production workloads in containers or plan to do so, according to a report by IT analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).
"Instead of being isolated to development teams, companies want containers to be a bigger part of production infrastructure. Red Hat sees OpenShift as a way to simplify infrastructure design for container-based apps," ESG storage analyst Scott Sinclair said.
Red Hat has plenty of competition in developing storage for containers. Dell Technologies-owned VMware has a similar effort based on its Tanzu Kubernetes platform suite. New Pure Storage acquisition Portworx, along with other container vendors, are angling to fortify containers for mainstream enterprise use. Pure bought the container storage software vendor last week for $370 million, the largest acquisition in the flash storage vendor's history.
The latest Red Hat OCS update supports shared read-write block access and highly available persistent storage for containers and virtual machines on the same integrated platform.
External mode in OCS 4.5 supports dedicated hardware nodes that serve as adjuncts to a main Kubernetes cluster. The deployment allows data lakes to reside outside the cluster but share data with applications across cloud and physical environments, using enhanced Red Hat Rook operators to automate tasks.
Red Hat added extensions to its Amazon S3 APIs to aggregate data streams and automate delivery from ingestion to consumption by applications. The notifications trigger downstream commands to Red Hat-native tools, such as Red Hat AMQ Streams data streaming or OpenShift serverless computing.
