Hitachi Vantara follows the herd on Kubernetes storage

Hitachi Vantara previewed its plans to address the growing use of storage for stateful Kubernetes containers.

The Hitachi Kubernetes Service (HKS) is a new compute component revealed this week for Hitachi's Unified Compute Platform converged, hyper-converged and rack-scale systems. HKS allows UCP nodes to be deployed as a Kubernetes-managed private cloud. Enterprises can streamline container management across local and hybrid cloud environments. 

Most of the issues surrounding persistent storage for containers have been satisfactorily addressed. Storage vendors have moved on to equipping their array-based systems to support a surge in container adoption. Dell EMC storage enhanced its container storage management via integration with Dell Technologies-owned VMware's Tanzu. NetApp launched Project Astra to containerize its OnTap storage operating system to manage clustered Kubernetes nodes. All-flash pioneer Pure Storage shelled out $370 million to buy Portworx, a container startup that specializes in cloud-native application development tools.

Hitachi wrote a Kubernetes API for HKS based on the open source Container Storage Interface, enabling Hitachi storage arrays to manage persistent volumes directly on Kubernetes nodes. The software behind HKS originated with Containership, a Pittsburgh-based startup that Hitachi acquired in 2019. The vendor said HKS is expected to be generally available later this year

Hitachi acquired that code primarily to address compute management and storage, which remains a challenge in Kubernetes deployments, said Peter Meister, Hitachi Vantara's head of product management for enterprise cloud.

"We believe containers will [create] the largest growth in storage over the next 20 years, especially at the mobile edge. That's going to be where the new compute gets managed along with new flash-based storage systems," Meister said.