UPDATED 07:30 EDT / FEBRUARY 22 2017

INFRA

Diamanti launches combined application container networking and storage appliance

Hyperconverged infrastructure startup Diamanti Inc. is bidding to solve the challenges of balancing networking and storage requirements for application containers with the launch today of a dedicated hardware appliance for running container workloads.

The launch comes as the company closed on an $18 million Series B round that brings its total funding to more than $30 million.

Called Diamanti D10, the appliance hits general availability Wednesday and is designed to automate much of the container implementation process, starting with the initial hardware configuration. The system, which was first announced last year, combines flash storage with networking in an integrated chassis, meaning organizations no longer have to piece together their container deployments on legacy hardware that Diamanti claims is unsuited for the job.

The company said the appliance can be quickly hooked up to existing infrastructure, allowing organizations to deploy containers “in seconds.” The appliance supports a range of Linux distributions and container orchestration tools, including the open-source Kubernetes and Mesosphere Inc.’s open-source Data Center Operating System.

Mark Balch, vice president of products at Diamanti, told SiliconANGLE that container deployments often break traditional networking, thereby creating complexities for addressing, service discovery and services such as load balancers and firewalls. Containers also cause problems with traditional storage systems, because arrays and storage area networks are difficult to set up and manage, leading to performance bottlenecks with microservices. Diamanti’s D10 appliance negates these problems, delivering a significant performance boost for container workloads, Balch said.

“Diamanti provides each container with networking that is compatible with existing data centers, and each container gets an IP/MAC so the existing processes and services continue to operate,” Balch said. “The model looks like a virtual machine, but there is no hypervisor. As well, Diamanti provides scale-out persistent storage for containers that keeps up with the rapid lifecycle and high performance of bare-metal containers.”

The appliance’s secret sauce is a special I/O controller card and software that makes storage resources inside the hyperconverged infrastructure easier for containers to use. It also helps to make the external network appear more familiar, Balch said.

Diamanti makes some impressive claims about the performance of its appliance. The Diamanti D10 claims existing customers typically see performance gains of 40 percent or more, consolidation is increased by up to six times, as well as a dramatic reduction in the total cost of ownership for container infrastructure. The company further boasts of guaranteed real-time service levels for container infrastructure.

“By isolating each container’s network/storage resources using our PCIe technology, we eliminate noisy neighbors, which are a primary cause of over-provisioning,” Balch said. “Most people running bare metal workloads do so at 10-15 percent utilization to achieve predictable performance, whereas we run at 90 percent – 6X consolidation or more – while delivering predictable performance.”

All of this adds up to considerable savings for customers, which can buy a lot less hardware to run their container workloads on. When you throw in the weeks or months of configuration work that Diamanti’s appliance eliminates, the adoption barrier for companies looking to move away from traditional virtualization becomes significantly lower. It’s a value proposition that has seen Diamanti sign up a number of big brands as customers, including NBCUniversal, and also secure the backing of several venture capital firms.

The $18 million series B funding round was led by new investor Northgate Capital, with participation from CRV, DFJ, Translink and GSR Ventures.

“We believe Diamanti is the first to deliver real-time service level guarantees to networking and storage infrastructure,” said Thorsten Claus, a partner at Northgate Capital. “Until now, we found that IT operators have been forced into complex and expensive ‘do-it-yourself’ Docker implementations since traditional network and storage technology was built for virtual machines rather than containers.”

Image courtesy of Diamanti

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