An array based on containers? It’s like storage for millenials! Last week I managed to catch up with the guys from StorageOS, a new container-based storage company, headquartered in London. I found out about them at a London Storage Beers event a few weeks ago, and my first question was, what the hell is container-based storage, and how does it work?!
By Alex Galbraith in TekHead

They started from the premise (yes that’s actually the correct use of the word premise!), that if you want to build a storage systemFOR containers, what better way to do it than to build it FROMcontainers. They therefore offer what they describe as “full enterprise storage array functionality, delivered by software, on a pay-as-you-go basis”. They also plan to offer a free-forever Developer tier, which includes everything except HA functionality which you would obviously need for production usage!

So the good news is, today (Monday 20th June 2016) StorageOS are announcing the release of their Beta at DockerCon, so you can now download and test out their new storage platform.

You can deploy this SW anywhere from bare metal to containers:

Appliances for some of the larger clouds are in the works, but will not be available on day zero.

They can then consume any back-end storage, from SSD, HDDs and virtual drives, to EBS volumes, object stores, etc. You then pool all of capacity from all devices into a capacity pool, which is deduped, encrypted, and available across all nodes, and carve out volumes to present to systems like Docker through their own native Docker driver, or (slightly oddly) iSCSI / FC!!! They even have VAAI support in development!

Overall, I think it’s a pretty interesting product. At first look it feels a bit like a traditional array in a container package, much like if you containerised an enterprise app, then just utilised as a traditional array with some container plugins, instead of being very targeted and container-specific. They do have an OS driver to let you mount their volumes direct from containers, but there are other things out there today which do that anyway (e.g.Flocker).

I would say their messaging is a little inconsistent at the moment, and adding things like FC integration early on feels a bit odd if they’re positioning themselves as a container play. They do however state clearly that they’re targeting enterprises and want to make the on-boarding process as simple and friction-less as possible. I do worry that this “all things to all people” approach could be a wee bit risky at this early stage, and being more laser focused in the short to medium term would allow them to differentiate more.

The founders were very specific when they stated that they were building a clustered array with synchronous remote replicas, not a distributed storage array. Async replication is coming, which will be critical to maintaining performance in a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud setup. I really like the fact that you can stretch the same hybrid storage environment between your on-premises and cloud infrastructure using a single storage solution. This same solution can actually be used to span multiple public clouds as well, providing a resilient storage solution between say AWS and Azure, all of which is deduced and encrypted of course! This could be very interesting indeed, as customers look to protect their workloads from large public outages!

Finally, the software is built (as you would expect these days) with APIs at the heart of everything. Even the modern GUI is really just based on API calls to the back end.

Anyway, enough gabbing… It’s still early days, but the storage experience of the founders is certainly solid! Who better than ex-storage admins to provide a product that works well for storage admins?! I’d say there’s a good chance of this becoming a pretty cool product in the future, so definitely one to watch!

You can find a link to their website and beta sign up here:
http://storageos.com/index.php/product/