The surge of interest in containerization that Docker Inc. helped spark a few years ago was followed by the rise of several other venture-backed startups likewise set on monetizing the technology. One of the most heavily-funded names on the list is Robin Systems Inc., which is applying the emerging virtualization approach to Hadoop and other data processing systems that have traditionally been deployed on bare-metal infrastructure.

The reason is that conventional hypervisors like VMware vSphere often consume a significant amount of computational power at the expense of the workload running on top. The resulting performance decrease can hinder an analytics cluster a great deal, especially if it’s handling fast-moving information that has to be analyzed and presented to users while it’s still fresh. Robin says that its namesake abstraction platform, which became generally available today, exploits the lightweight nature of containers to provide the benefits of virtualization without the overhead.

The startup claims that one customer, an unnamed “leading global retailer”, was able to cut the number of servers in its analytics environment by half without compromising performance. Robin’s software also reduces storage requirements in conjunction by making it possible to share common information among applications instead having to make a separate copy for each. And to top it all off, the platform then speeds up access to the remaining records with a flash-based caching layer that promises to provide an up to threefold improvement in query performance over competing alternatives.

Rounding out the Robin Containerization Platform is a set of management features designed to help organizations exploit its operational benefits to the fullest advantage. An administrator can set service level guarantees to ensure that an important database always has access to the resources it needs to maintain optimal performance, and spread out the information inside across different types of storage mediums. The software even provides the ability to move some of the data in a cloud platform like Amazon Web Services for cost-saving purposes.

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