Linux company Red Hat Inc. is bringing what it calls “versatile software-defined storage” to its OpenShift Container Platform.

The idea is to make it easier for those working with the platform to provision, manage, scale and upgrade their storage environments for container-based workloads. The new feature comes as part of Red Hat’s Container-Native Storage 3.6 release, a product that’s built atop the company’s Gluster Storage technology and integrated with the OpenShift Container platform.

Red Hat’s Gluster Storage combines file storage with a scaled-out architecture that lets users efficiently store and manage unstructured data, providing cost-effective and highly available storage without compromising on scale or performance. Meanwhile, the OpenShift Container Platform is an on-premises private platform as a service product, built around Docker-based application containers, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

Red Hat said Container-Native Storage 3.6 is designed to serve the unique storage needs of application containers, especially for hybrid cloud environments because it can be deployed both on-premises and in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The idea behind the platform is that, according to the company, it eliminates the need for independent storage platforms for such workloads, delivering advantages including a single control plane, cost savings and a more streamlined experience.

More specifically, Red Hat said, software-defined container-native storage addresses many of the challenges developers face when using traditional storage architecture with containers. These challenges include a lack of flexibility that makes scaling out storage capacity in such environments a major headache.

Container-native storage brings support for file, block and object storage interfaces, which means containerized apps can be made more portable, the company said. Block storage provides support for distributed databases like Elasticsearch, while object storage enables an embedded object store for apps that require it.

“As enterprises move over to hybrid cloud infrastructures and support on-premises and public cloud deployments, they need to ensure support for containerized applications and infrastructure with a secure, integrated storage platform,” said Henry Baltazar, research vice president at 451 Research Inc. “Red Hat Container-Native Storage enables customers to move to a single integrated container platform across their hybrid cloud infrastructure, creating a versatile storage platform for containers while simplifying management.”

Red Hat said Container-Native Storage 3.6 is available now via its customer portal.

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