Open-source software-defined storage vendor Nexenta Systems Inc. has outlined a vision of how it intends to add support for Docker containers to its technology.

For starters, Nextenta is partnering with ClusterHQ to support its container data management software Flocker. In addition, Nexenta is also adding support for VMware Inc.’s vSphere Integrated Containers, which allow containers to run on existing instances of VMware; and also VMware Photon OS, a new project announced at VMworld 2015 that embeds Docker containers inside a lighter-weight virtual machine.

In line with these efforts, Nexenta says it’s joining two highly regarded organizations – the Open Container Initiative and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Finally, Nexenta says its Nexenta Edge and Nexenta Stor products have both been integrated with the Kubernetes container management framework.

The ultimate goal of these initiatives is to ensure Nexenta can provide persistent block-level storage for containers that run either natively on a physical server, or atop of multiple virtual machines (VMs). The idea is that users will be able to move those containers across server clusters as needed, without any disruption.

Thomas Cornely, chief product officer at Nexenta, told Data Center Knowledge that most enterprise IT teams don’t want to go through the trouble of deploying separate server clusters to support both VMs and Docker containers. Instead, most enterprises are looking for a way to eliminate separate arrays for managing their primary storage.

“Our focus is on scale-out storage that is simple to deploy,” Cornely explained. “We’re eliminating the waste created by the iSCSI stack.”

Nexenta believes that most enterprise container deployments will initially be atop of VMs, as these already offer a rich set of management tools. However, the company believes there’ll be an increase in people running containers on physical servers as the container management framework matures.

As such, Nexenta believes one of the prerequisites for customers looking at software-defined storage solutions will be whether or not that solution is able to support both containers and VMs.

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