Storage virtualization is a tricky business, and it is not without its inherent problems. However, containerized storage is showing great promise in reducing or eliminating many of the problems encountered today.

Premal Buch, CEO of Robin Systems, Inc., and Partha Seetala, CTO of Robin Systems, sat down with John Furrier (@furrier) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during DockerCon 2016 in Seattle, Washington, to discuss how how their company is using containers to address the virtualization problem.

Containers: An old solution to a new problem

Virtualization of storage requires a heavy layer of software to manage the consolidation properly. Multiple applications sharing the same virtual storage medium sometimes conflict with each other due to issues with the hypervisor specs. Robin Systems is successfully using storage containers to address this problem.

“What we are doing is looking at how to apply containers to the problem of virtualization,” explained Buch.

Predictability in the application centric data center

One of the major issues in using application-centric infrastructure is the ability of the various control applications to process in a predictable manner. When multiple applications are operating in a virtual environment, the resulting I/O conflicts between them eventually begins to cause performance degradation.

“The moment [the customer] essentially puts multiple apps on the same post, whether it’s containerized or not, predictability is gone,” said Seetala.

This is where Robin System’s unique system of containerized storage comes in, and the company is making headway in solving some of the predictability issues.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’scoverage of the DockerCon 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE