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March 11, 2020

Hitachi Vantara Boosts Kubernetes Portfolio

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As application containers enter the mainstream to handle an increasing percentage of production workloads, infrastructure vendors trying to keep pace with the shift to hybrid clouds are also migrating to the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator to promote application portability and DevOps productivity.

Those were among the trends driving the acquisition of a four-year-old startup by data services and IT automation specialist Hitachi Vantara. Pittsburgh-based Containership is the developer of a container service platform built around the de facto standard cluster orchestrator.

Terms of the acquisition announced on Tuesday (March 10) were not disclosed.

The Hitachi unit has already made the leap to Kubernetes with its enterprise cloud container platform that also runs on VMware and Mesosphere. The company said Containership’s technology would boost its ability to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters and application containers across hybrid cloud deployments.

“Container orchestration is a rapidly evolving market and we continue to invest in solutions that help IT and DevOps teams maximize their infrastructure advantage,” the company said this week in announcing the Containership acquisition.

The deal infrastructure deal is the second in as many months for Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of the Japanese industrial giant (TSE: 6501). The unit acquired the data catalog startup Waterline Data in late January. That transaction is expected to close by the end of March.

Containership’s software addresses application issues for Kubernetes users such as support for persistent storage in application containers, centralized authentication, access control, audit logging and autoscaling, among others.

Containership’s Kubernetes engine enables the provisioning and maintenance of Kubernetes clusters on public and private clouds. The startup’s Kubernetes distribution adheres to an API standard established by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

In a recent version release, Containership noted in a blog post that customers want “a consistent and reliable tool to provision their Kubernetes infrastructure, namely across clouds, as well as manage all of their infrastructure resources from a centralized dashboard.”

Recent items:

Kubernetes Gets an Automated ML Workflow

HPE Ships Container Platform, Including Kubernetes and MapR File System

Hitachi Vantara Buys Data Cataloger Waterline Data

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