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Hitachi Vantara Makes Kubernetes Container Technology Acquisition

Bobby Soni

March 10, 2020


Container technology promises to usher in the biggest step change in infrastructure economics since server virtualization.

By some estimates, customers are saving as much as 50% on infrastructure costs by switching from hosting cloud native applications in their own data centers to hosting containerized versions of those applications in a private, hybrid or public cloud.

Other key advantages of containerization include increased developer productivity, application portability, and business agility delivered through DevOps.

Industry analyst firm Gartner forecasts, “by 2023, more than 70% of global organizations will be running more than two containerized applications in production, up from less than 20% in 2019.” 1 The migration to containers is on track to create an $8.2 billion market by 2025, according to Grand View Research.

But all of this opportunity also comes with technical challenges. Deploying containers at scale across multiple cloud environments brings management and orchestration complexity that most IT teams do not have the skills to address. Of course, this is the type of automation challenge that we at Hitachi Vantara live for!

Kubernetes, the open source container management technology developed by Google has been a critical enabler of containerization. Hitachi Vantara already delivers infrastructure solutions that leverage the Kubernetes technology. However, container orchestration is a rapidly evolving market and we continue to invest in solutions that help IT and DevOps teams maximize their infrastructure advantage.

Today, I can share that Hitachi Vantara has acquired the assets of Kubernetes start-up Containership. Containership enables customers to easily deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters and containerized applications in public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise environments.

The software addresses critical cloud native application issues facing customers working with Kubernetes such as persistent storage support, centralized authentication, access control, audit logging, continuous deployment, workload portability, cost analysis, autoscaling, upgrades, and more.

Containership’s underlying technology – the Containership Kubernetes Engine – is a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution which enables the provisioning and ongoing maintenance of Kubernetes clusters on any major cloud provider.

We are pleased to have acquired this promising Kubernetes IP and look forward to working closely with the Kubernetes community as we integrate the technology across our portfolio.

You can expect to hear more from us on that subject in the next few quarters.

1 Source: Gartner, 3 Critical Mistakes That I&O Leaders Must Avoid With Containers, Jeffrey Hewitt, August 2, 2019