Hitachi Vantara has bought the assets of Containership, a tiny, collapsed six-year-old startup based in Pittsburgh. This gives the data storage giant the means to supply storage to Kubernetes-orchestrated containers.
Hitachi Vantara will integrate Containership technology across its product portfolio in the next few quarters. It will then be able to help its customers deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters and containerised applications in their public cloud and on-premises environments.
Announcing the news today, Bobby Soni, Hitachi Vantara COO, wrote: “Container technology promises to usher in the biggest step change in infrastructure economics since server virtualization.”
He reckons that “deploying containers at scale across multiple cloud environments brings management and orchestration complexity that most IT teams do not have the skills to address”.
Kubernetes Engine
Containership’s technology provides persistent storage support, centralised authentication, access control, audit logging, continuous deployment, workload portability, cost analysis, autoscaling, upgrades, and more.
Its Kubernetes Engine is a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution and enables the provisioning and ongoing maintenance of Kubernetes clusters on any major cloud provider.
Containership crashed and died in September last year. The company started out as Docker-based and pivoted to Kubernetes technology in early 2018 with a Containership Cloud product. In a September 2019 blog, since deleted, CTO Norman Joyner announced the company’s closure: “Ultimately, we came up short … we have failed to monetize Containership Cloud in such a way that we could build a sustainable business.”
