StorageOS is rebranding to Ondat, signifying a Shift Left exercise.
The company supplies software-defined cloud-native storage for enterprise Kubernetes-orchestrated environments and has more than 5500 installed Kubernetes clusters worldwide. It has produced a blog explaining why it has done so to address a Shift Left in storage.
What is that when it is at home? “Shift Left” is DevOps jargon for automating cloud-native application test, management and operational processes and doing them early on in an application’s life cycle. Imagine an application’s agile development life cycle flows from the left o the right through from define, through plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate and monitor, and back to plan again in a loop. Shift Left means doing things earlier in the flow to get sight of problems faster and fix them quicker.
The Ondat blog explains: “Data, storage and storage management is ‘shifting left’ to the developer. Kube-native developers and platform engineers are becoming the most influential consumers of enterprise storage and storage-based data services.“
We should realise that: “Developers compose the entire application platform — including storage, as all applications store state somewhere. Organisations must make it easier for developers to get storage right, from the start, in order to avoid having to fix it later.”
In Ondat’s view, Kube-native developers expect push-button access to a persistent data store with scale, high availability, flexibility, security and performance, and no cloud services lock-in.
It says other CSPs, storage vendors and system suppliers view developers “as a new route to lock in customers to their storage.” Ondat does not, and provides customers with the freedom to choose, configure and control the platform, and the places where their applications are built and run.
Its eponymous software is a — in fact it says the — Kube-native platform for running stateful applications, anywhere, at scale.
The name
But the name: Ondat. Where does that come from? StorageOS, as it then was, announced on October 4 that it had joined The Data on Kubernetes Community (DoKC), an openly governed community for data on Kubernetes, as a Silver Sponsor. It looks like OnDat is a rearrangement of “Data on” — shift the “on” left, drop an “a” and you have OnDat — a kind of visual Shift Left effect.
In StorageOS’s DoKC announcement, CEO Alex Chircop said: “As companies migrate more business-critical applications onto Kubernetes, DevOps teams and Platform Engineers are becoming the new controllers of enterprise data. This can open up enterprises to massive new risks, but offers equally large opportunities for storage innovation, freedom and cost savings. The DoKC is an open, collaborative community at the heart of this movement. These are exactly the people StorageOS is working to serve.”
StorageOS wants to fuel open collaboration and knowledge-sharing in the way data is handled on Kubernetes. Chircop said this: “The more innovation we see in this space, the greater the demand will be for StorageOS technology. We offer Kube-native technology that delivers data freedom and control; we enable innovation and allow new workloads to be brought onto Kubernetes; and we give our users independence from storage vendors and cloud provider lock-in.”
The OnDat rebrand is entirely in keeping with this view.
