Containerizing Traditional Workloads: Evaluating the Approaches to Meet Persistent Storage Demands in Containers
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White Paper Containerizing Traditional Workloads: Evaluating the Approaches to Meet Persistent Storage Demands in Containers Sponsored by: Pure Storage Archana Venkatraman March 2019 IDC OPINION Container technology has emerged as one of the hottest topics in the industry in the past 24 months. Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, and hyperscalers' container services are a hot favorite among developers who architect cloud-native applications and accelerate digital transformation. IDC predicts that by 2021, enterprise apps will shift toward hyperagile architectures, with 90% of applications on cloud platforms (platform as a service [PaaS]) using microservices and cloud functions and over 95% of new microservices being deployed in containers. IDC believes that container technology will have a disruptive impact on the application development and the virtualization markets. Although large cloud providers and hyperscalers lead the installed base for container instances today, IDC expects container instances to reach 3 billion by 2021, with non-hyperscale environments holding majority share and growing at an accelerated pace by 2021. Yielding benefits, early adopters are using containers to support both cloud-native applications and traditional applications. This desire to containerize mainstream applications is beginning to overturn storage needs, representing huge opportunities to storage vendors that innovate within this new paradigm. Containerized application environments are fluid and scale rapidly and unpredictably. Keeping storage overheads under control as containers scale is critical if more traditional and persistent workloads are to be successfully containerized. Enterprises cite storage and data persistence as one of the key barriers to the broad adoption of containers besides security, performance overheads, and networking. Vendors that offer appropriate storage for containerized environments with simplicity, cloudlike experience, and smart management can accelerate the workload modernization journey and propel the cloud and digital transformation journeys of enterprises. IDC also believes that persistent storage services that bring the best of on- premises storage resiliency with cloudlike scale for containerized applications can make container adoption smoother and faster. Pure Storage's container storage-as-a-service offering — Pure Service Orchestrator (PSO) — offers persistent storage and data services to containerized applications as well as helps manage, provision, and scale storage infrastructures in tune with the dynamic container world. The future of storage is software defined, cloud connected, API driven, dynamically scalable, automated, and container aware. With Pure Service Orchestrator, the storage disruptor continues to innovate and remain relevant to workloads in virtual and containerized environments. March 2019, IDC #US44857318
IN THIS WHITE PAPER
Containers were initially aimed primarily at new cloud-native applications because containers are
inherently stateless and ephemeral, but enterprises are now evaluating containers for lift-and-shift
applications such as the classic three-tier applications, Java applications, or any database-dependent
workload. This widens the workloads containers need to address, and it has become vital to respond
to the storage, data integrity, data persistence, storage persistence, container patching, and security
needs to accelerate container adoption across enterprises.
This White Paper analyzes the multiple approaches to support data persistence for applications
running on containers. It also assesses Pure Storage's shared storage services offering for container
and cloud environments — Pure Service Orchestrator — and how the vendor is innovating with a focus
on persistent storage challenges for containerized environments. In addition, IDC examines the future
opportunities and challenges within the context of the evolving enterprise storage landscape.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Container technology is already in heavy production use by many hyperscale web and software-as-a-
service (SaaS) providers such as Google (which runs everything from Gmail to YouTube to Search in
containers). But IDC estimates that container instances in non-hyperscale environments will overtake
the container installed base in hyperscale and SaaS environments by 2021.
Containers are appealing to enterprises for several reasons:
▪ Desire to develop software faster to improve time to market and compete with digital
disruptors.
▪ Scale applications to be highly responsive and to meet increasing application loads.
▪ Modernize application design by using microservices and DevOps methodologies to suit the
cloud world.
▪ Constant need to make more efficient use of computing resources.
▪ Make applications portable as multicloud and hybrid cloud environments emerge as desired
outcomes.
▪ Improve abstraction from underlying operating systems (OSs) and other infrastructure
software, reducing the potential to break applications when updating or replacing lower-level
software layers.
▪ Find ways to overcome traditional virtualization licensing fees as IT estate grows bigger.
Some organizations also feel that containers make it much easier to collaborate on development
across different geographies and public clouds and help accelerate the journey to the cloud.
When IDC asked enterprises about future IT strategies and investments up to 2020, the top 3
initiatives cited were cloud infrastructure evolution (50%), IT infrastructure modernization (50%), and
security, compliance, and privacy (49%). We see container adoption at the heart of this infrastructure
modernization and cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) evolution.
In IDC's opinion, traditional workload modernization is necessary to make digital transformation
enterprisewide. Containerizing critical applications requires enterprises to address the storage, data
integrity, data persistence, storage persistence, container patching, and security needs more
emphatically.
©2019 IDC #US44857318 2Containers were built to be ephemeral and stateless. Consequently, a majority of the initial enterprise
containers deployed are "stateless," with less than 10% applications today having a need for state. But
cloud architects and IT decision makers are tempted to use containers for traditional workloads (such
as lift-and-shift applications) after seeing the improved use of infrastructure and more scalable and
resilient operations. We believe that in the next couple of years, at least a quarter of container
applications would have a need for state. In addition, enterprises are exploring open source NoSQL
databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra so that developers can control data structures in their
applications without reliance on database administrators (DBAs) or a formal database schema change
process. This in turn frees up DBAs to focus on strategic tasks such as data integration and risk
management. Open source databases integrate with Docker and Kubernetes and help companies take
advantage of portability and scale of containers. But database nodes are stateful, and IT architects
need to ensure full resiliency and protection.
As more traditional workloads get containerized, the need for enterprise-grade storage and security
services becomes more emphatic.
IDC's 2018 survey of enterprises on IT infrastructure, operations, and management (see Figure 1)
revealed that beyond public cloud IaaS, investing in software-defined storage and networking
technologies is key to support the IT need of both cloud-native and traditional applications.
FIGURE 1
Key Technologies to Support Future IT Needs of Traditional and
Cloud-Native Applications
Q. When considering how to best architect your IT infrastructure environment to support the
"future" needs, which of the following technologies do you think will have the most significant
impact over the next three to five years?
Public cloud IaaS 43%
Software-defined storage 40%
DevOps continuous integration and deployment
38%
software and services
Private cloud infrastructure based on OpenStack 38%
Big Data 34%
Multicloud automation/orchestration and
32%
self-service portals
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%
(%)
n = 951
Source: IDC's IT Optimization Survey, 2018
©2019 IDC #US44857318 3In IDC's opinion, as container technology matures further, there will be a balanced ratio of cloud-native
and traditional workloads on containers, and the arbitrary differentiation between stateless and stateful
will fade, and the need for security, data services, and storage for containers will be critical.
The current approaches to meeting the persistent storage needs for containerized applications (see
Figure 2):
▪ Deployment of container data volumes on direct-attached storage (DAS)
▪ Use of existing shared storage (network-attached storage/storage area network [NAS/SAN])
via a container volume plug-in
▪ Deployment of new container-native storage with a rich set of container data services
▪ Delivery of container storage as a service using existing shared storage with cloud-native
capabilities and data services such as snapshots
FIGURE 2
Approaches to Meet Persistent Storage Demands for Containers
SAN/NAS with container plug-in DAS with container plug-in
New New
Container Container Container Container Container Container Container Container
Container Container
Node Node Node Node Node Node Node Node
Node Node
Container Orchestration and Container Orchestration and
Management Management
Volume Volume Volume
Volume plug-in Volume plug-in
plug-in plug-in plug-in
Data Services Data Services Data Services
DAS DAS DAS DAS
SAN Array/ SAN Array/ SAN Array/ Device Device Device Device
NAS Device NAS Device NAS Device
Tedious manual process to add new storage Tedious manual process to add new storage
Container-native storage Container storage as a service
New
Container Container Container
Container
Container Container Container New Container Node Node Node
Node
Node Node Node Node
Container Orchestration and Management
Storage Storage Storage Storage
Container Container Container Container
[Data+ [Data+ [Data+ [Data+ Storage Services Orchestrator with Smart and
Control Plane] Control Plane] Control Plane] Control Plane] Automated Provisioning Capabilities
Data Services
Storage pool (block, file, and object APIs)
Block Block Block File File
Storage Storage Storage Storage Storage
Container Orchestration and
Management Shared Storage Pool
Automated process to add new storage at scale, Automated process to add new storage at scale
but resiliency and security are unproven in with enterprise-grade storage performance and
production environments security features
Source: IDC, 2019
While all the current approaches to providing persistent storage for stateful containers work, there are
associated pros and cons. Essentially, enterprises need to look for the following key attributes when
selecting storage for container workloads:
▪ Ability to address both the "Dev" (speed and self-service) needs and the "Ops" needs (security
and availability)
▪ Integration with a standardized container environment
©2019 IDC #US44857318 4▪ Support for heterogeneous container platforms, databases, and storage protocols
▪ Enterprise-class reliability, performance, and security
▪ Automated container storage on demand
▪ Ability to leverage a shared storage infrastructure
▪ A familiar management interface for continuity
So what are the benefits and challenges that each of the current storage approaches that
organizations are relying on to deliver storage persistence for containerized applications? Let's assess
each of these approaches. In detail:
▪ Traditional SAN/NAS has a rich set of enterprise features but is hardware centric, expensive,
difficult to scale, and rigid to operate. The provisioning of additional storage is manual and
tedious and doesn't lend itself to the dynamic and rapidly scalable nature of containers,
microservices, or agile application development, making this approach a stopgap arrangement
for meeting persistent storage requirements for containerized applications. Every time new
storage is added, this approach requires IT to reprogram the storage destination into the
application, and this can add to storage overheads.
The basic plug-ins for Docker and Kubernetes environments that a flurry of vendors started
offering are not highly efficient beyond single storage environments as they cannot handle
dynamic provisioning and cause delays as containers move between nodes. Although rapid
innovation is occurring in this space and many start-ups are innovating to overcome the
challenges, it is still early days.
▪ The DAS approach is cost efficient but is challenged in terms of availability and support, lacks
system resiliency, and is complex in data management. DAS with container plug-ins also
depends on manual processes to add new storage as containers scale and do not offer the
opportunity to capitalize on an existing shared storage pool.
▪ Container-native storage offerings are software defined, run on industry standard hardware,
and support elastic scalability. But beyond offering cloudlike scale, container-native storage
solutions in the market haven't been rigorously tested for security, resiliency, or performance
for business-critical systems of record. Although this approach brings a new level of
simplification for containerized applications, it is a new paradigm for many enterprises, and the
security (encryption) or data reduction techniques in container-native storage aren't yet highly
mature. In conversations with IDC, large enterprises said that they haven't fully tested the
resiliency of container-native storage. Unwilling to compromise on application resiliency, IT
departments rarely deploy container-native storage in production environments. Container-
native storage is not able to support a broad spectrum of workloads typically spread across
on-premises, virtual, cloud, and container platforms — this is paradoxical to the desire from
customers that want to simplify and unify their infrastructures.
▪ Another option is using existing shared storage as a service with cloud-native capabilities and
container data services. Such a container storage-as-a-service approach brings the flexibility
to provision persistent storage up to the container specifically from a shared storage array.
The addition of new storage volumes is automated, real time, and optimized while enabling
enterprises to leverage the storage policies, performance, and reliability of their existing
shared storage architectures. It also helps keep the container nodes lightweight.
One important benefit of using shared storage services for multiple workloads and
infrastructures is how it facilitates the cloud migration journey. Enterprises can overcome the
scalability and performance obstacles for their lift-and-shift applications in containers. This in
©2019 IDC #US44857318 5turn brings portability and interoperability to go multicloud and accelerate cloud adoption in a
risk-mitigated manner.
As enterprises move beyond DAS and SAN/NAS for containers to more software-defined, container-
focused storage that integrates with popular container schedulers, it is important to understand the
differences between container-native and container-aware storage-as-a-service offerings and what
they bring to the table.
Container-native storage are solutions that run storage as containers within the container pods (refer
back to Figure 2). The application pod and storage pod are colocated in a unified configuration. While
this unified configuration brings simplicity, it usually supports single storage pod per node. It also
requires a sophisticated network architecture to allow storage pods and app pods to communicate
effectively. It can make maintenance tasks complex, thereby requiring deep visibility into where the
storage pods are to ensure data accessibility at all time. On the other hand, container-aware storage
as a service is a platform that federates existing storage and makes it available to the containers by
integrating with the container orchestration and management framework. Container-aware storage is
highly scalable and configurable and brings enterprise-grade features such as resiliency, availability,
and quality of service (QoS).
Containerized Applications: Designing Storage to Meet Modern Workloads
and Users' Needs
Ambitious enterprises that have moved beyond cloud-native applications in containers are assessing
workloads such as mobile platforms that come with databases (such as MongoDB), emphasizing the
need for storage persistence and enterprise-grade backup policies. As these scenarios move from
being an exception to a norm, companies will realize that traditional storage infrastructure is not able to
cope with the new container paradigms.
IDC believes that in a modern architecture, storage and storage management need to be defined by
the application and not by the infrastructure, so applications perform better and faster and are portable.
Infrastructure and DevOps teams prefer solutions that provision storage alongside the application on
the same node to guarantee local performance to the application. Keeping data close to memory and
CPU can free enterprises from relying heavily on the network as a point of congestion.
The future belongs to storage offerings that are software defined, automated, container aware, and
highly scalable and offer rich data services for multiple workloads across heterogeneous platforms.
This storage architecture fits an era where enterprises take advantage of emerging application
deployment technologies and approaches, including DevOps, hyperagile, and microservices. IDC
research shows that simultaneously supporting traditional and cloud-native applications and optimizing
infrastructure capacity use and costs are among the top 5 concerns to support container and DevOps
environments (see Figure 3).
IDC believes that existing shared storage services that scale rapidly and offer enterprise-grade QoS
and data services for containerized applications will be one of the main preferred storage options for
containers in the long term.
Enterprises will evaluate solutions that bring application resiliency and low storage overheads and
offer the familiarity of storage management they are used to in the virtualized world to create a
continuum of storage services across their virtual, cloud, and container environments.
©2019 IDC #US44857318 6FIGURE 3
IT Infrastructure, Management, and Automation Concerns to Support
DevOps and Containers Over the Next Three to Five Years
Q. What are the greatest areas of concern for you when considering how well your IT
infrastructure, management, and automation strategies will be able to support emerging
business, IT, and DevOps priorities over the next three to five years?
IT management skills and process gaps 39%
Increasing operational complexity 37%
Increasing frequency of infrastructure changes 34%
Simultaneously supporting and integrating different
32%
generations of technology (traditional and cloud native)
Optimizing infrastructure capacity use and costs
31%
including IaaS
Need to provide developers with easier to use
30%
on-demand self-service infrastructure
Fragmented management tools and process silos make it
30%
difficult to change quickly
0% 10% 20% 30% 40%
(%)
n = 951
Source: IDC's IT Optimization Survey, 2018
Ultimately, the performance of applications is dependent on the speed and quality of their interactions
with data, and more often this is where the bottleneck lies. Data needs to be closer to applications, but
traditional storage cannot autoconfigure and autoscale and follow applications closely, making
performance unpredictable in the new scale-up and scale-out containerized IT environments.
IDC believes that whether a workload is in virtual machines (VMs) or containers, there can be no
compromise on performance, resiliency, security, and data services. In fact, containers are more
dynamic, so the need for faster and automated provisioning of storage is higher. Container workloads
have greater management and scalability demands and need fast, automated provisioning. In addition,
as containerized environments sprawl quickly, it is even more important for storage to be cloudlike.
The emphasis will be on performance, data services, low costs, simplicity, and cloudlike experience in
delivering storage to container workloads. Enterprises need to think about storage for modern
infrastructure and for all key applications in a holistic manner. They need to consider whether the
storage offering can bring the same tier 1 resilience, reliability, and protection that mission-critical
applications depend upon when they are in container clusters.
The future belongs to vendors that can provide policy-driven storage with enterprise-grade data
services including role-based access controls or encryption for data at rest and data in flight for
containers running on virtual machines, on bare metal, and in the cloud. The integration with Docker,
©2019 IDC #US44857318 7Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift, Mesosphere, and Pivotal Container Service can give developers
easy access to storage volumes through these container platforms, and they can manage storage via
APIs, command-line interfaces (CLIs), or graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The future-ready storage
solutions also need to appeal to infrastructure teams that can automate storage management and
apply policy with rules, monitor and report on policies and service-level agreements (SLAs), provide
thin provisioning and volume management for cloud storage, and maintain quality of service for critical
applications.
While in many instances developers are taking the lead in container adoption for cloud-native
applications, the infrastructure teams are evaluating containers too. In conversations with IDC, many
telcos, OpenStack IT shops, and complex enterprise IT shops indicate that they are evaluating
Kubernetes and looking at storage systems for scalability and high performance, making integration
and functionalities such as scale out, application performance, and latency very critical.
Pure Storage ticks these boxes with its Pure Service Orchestrator offering.
Pure Storage's Pure Service Orchestrator
Pure Service Orchestrator delivers container storage as a service to meet the dynamic storage and
data management needs of applications running in containerized environments. Using PSO, Pure's
customers can leverage their existing on-premises storage infrastructure to support the storage needs
of tens of thousands of containers without making huge architectural changes to their well-established
storage environments.
The solution federates Pure's FlashArray and FlashBlade storage to be consumed through a storage-as-
a-service API. PSO functions as the control plane layer that enables containerized environments to move
away from storage as a device to storage services — more in tune with the cloud and container worlds.
This is significant because the data plane continues to run normally, and every time capacity is added to
the PSO storage pool, it is seamless and invisible, keeping the communication between the application
and storage still lightweight and API driven, upholding the merits of containers. It also makes the
provisioning of storage very fast (in seconds), providing persistent storage to containerized applications
instantly. This abstraction also means that the activities on the array side are uninterrupted, making
shared storage services viable for both containerized and virtual environments as needs arise.
Pure Service Orchestrator also integrates seamlessly with container orchestration platforms such as
Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, so developers and DevOps teams themselves can provision policy-
based persistent storage on demand to containerized applications. Such self-service capability without
relying on a storage admin helps developers become more efficient and empowered.
The Pure Service Orchestrator Docker plug-in gave us a highly performant and easy
to prototype way to launch our next-generation datacenter using Pure Storage. It cut
our time to market by months and helped us launch on time. — Ted Liu, staff systems
engineer, Medallia
The key pillars of Pure Service Orchestrator's container storage as a service are:
▪ Dynamic, automated provisioning: PSO delivers on-demand storage after assessing key
aspects such as performance load, capacity utilization, and storage system stability.
▪ Elastic scaling: The solution sits between the storage devices and the container orchestrator.
When a containerized application claims persistent storage from the container orchestration
platform (e.g., Kubernetes), the claim is pushed to PSO, which makes smart provisioning
©2019 IDC #US44857318 8decision based on policy tags and file- or block-based storage needs or data services and
provisions storage. When capacity is added via a new array or namespace, it can be pooled
into the container storage services infrastructure via a single-line command into the
orchestrator layer without programming it into the applications each time.
▪ Transparent recovery: Pure Service Orchestrator binds a storage volume to a single persistent
volume claim at any given time. This helps prevent accidental data corruption in case there is
a Kubernetes cluster "split brain" condition. As a result, simultaneous I/O to the same storage
volume is eliminated. It also provides automatic failover and reliability by leveraging the six-
nines availability in Pure's FlashArray.
PSO allows importing existing data from a Pure Storage array, facilitating easy migration of traditional
applications to containers. For example, customers can take a clone of their traditional database and
allow the containerized database to import this volume and start working immediately without the need
to reload the database. This is a significant feature because oftentimes, it is the data migration that is
tricky, forcing enterprises to reconsider the use of containers for traditional workloads because of the
dependencies.
Another highlight is how Pure Storage enables Kubernetes snapshots. In conversation with partners
and customers, IDC gathered that Pure Storage's snapshot capabilities are popular. Customer
requests are also moving beyond just provisioning of persistent storage for containers to now wanting
to integrate into workflows so they can snap and copy the data for different environments. The feature
allows customers to take advantage of all the benefits of Pure Storage's cloning and snapshot features
in the container world, making it a viable solution for enterprises looking to leverage containers for
mission-critical applications.
The Docker integration works seamlessly — our developers can build and deploy
container-based persistent applications effortlessly. And Pure Service Orchestrator
takes this to the next level with on-demand provisioning for stateful containers based
on policy. Pure's Shared Accelerated Storage model, combined with the simplicity, will
be key to scaling containerized environments like ours. — Don Bauer, lead DevOps
engineer, Franklin American Mortgage Company (acquired by Citizens Bank)
In IDC's opinion, Pure Service Orchestrator marks a significant progress in Pure Storage's engineering
efforts in delivering storage for container environments. From the initial container plug-in it launched in
2017 to this full-blown container storage as a service, Pure has demonstrated commitment to not just
bring persistent storage for container workloads but to do so by delivering a cloudlike experience,
automation, QoS, simplicity, and snapshots. Much of the engineering efforts and investment in building
PSO solution is focused on eliminating storage overheads, latency, manual provisioning, and scaling
inefficiencies. The smart provisioning features and the integration with the container orchestration
platforms make Pure Service Orchestrator simple to use and fit for the cloud and container era. Cloud
has fundamentally reset people's expectations from IT.
Developers and workload architects want public cloud–like experience when provisioning storage for
containerized applications in their own private clouds. In fact, IDC predicts that by 2022, over 80% of
enterprises will prioritize the "public cloud experience" (such as access to new technologies and
intuitive operations workflows) across all their infrastructure platforms. Companies need to evaluate
important new technologies that bring this experience and leverage innovation in adjacent
infrastructure areas to implement them.
©2019 IDC #US44857318 9The addition of container shared storage services further elevates the value of Pure's Shared
Accelerated Storage offering to provide storage and data services to all workloads — virtualized,
containerized, cloud applications, and monolithic traditional applications. With Pure Service
Orchestrator, Pure Storage has continued to innovate and respond quickly to storage needs from
emerging technologies.
Cloud application platforms, without a doubt is a red-hot market. Although there is a reference
architecture for Pure Service Orchestrator with Red Hat OpenShift (see Figure 4), Pure Storage is
placing the right bets by launching an agnostic service for any PaaS. Enterprises continue to leverage
PaaS and application platforms to help them build the next generation of highly scalable applications
using newer tools like microservices. The PaaS market is estimated to grow at a strong double-digit
CAGR. IDC expects that by 2021, the public cloud PaaS market will grow at a CAGR of 26.8% and the
hosted private PaaS market will grow at a CAGR of 21.3%. Pure Storage needs to continue its focus on
the broad container and both public and private PaaS markets to remain relevant and widen its TAM.
As a storage industry disruptor, Pure Storage understands enterprise needs from storage,
infrastructure complexities, and importance of features such as cloudlike scale and automated
provisioning to appeal to a new breed of personas such as developers, cloud architects, application
owners, and DevOps users.
FIGURE 4
Pure Service Orchestrator and Red Hat OpenShift Reference Architecture
CONTAINER CONTAINER CONTAINER CONTAINER CONTAINER
OPENSHIFT SELF-SERVICE
MIDDLEWARE + DATA SERVICES SERVICE CATALOG
BUILD AUTOMATION DEPLOYMENT AUTOMATION
OPENSHIFT APPLICATION LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
CONTAINER ORCHESTRATION CLUSTER SERVICES
Pure Storage & Red Hat
NETWORKING STORAGE REGISTRY TELEMETRY SECURITY
REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE: ATOMIC AUTOMATION ATOMIC COCKPIT
ALL-FLASH
CONTAINER RUNTIME & PACKAGING
ATOMIC HOST
ON-PREM PaaS RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX
PURE SERVICE ORCHESTRA TOR
SHARED STORAGE INFRASTRUCTURE [FLASHARRAY + FLASHBLADE]
PURE STORAGE
Source: Pure Storage, 2018
©2019 IDC #US44857318 10CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES Containers are proving to be highly useful for business agility, software development life-cycle (SDLC) acceleration, and cost savings in the era of innovation economy. There is a fast-growing ecosystem of container schedulers and frameworks, and much of the innovation is focused on persistent storage challenges for stateful applications as it is identified as one of the first significant barriers to faster adoption. But there are still challenges that Pure Storage will need to overcome to claim a strong stake in this burgeoning market. Challenges The lack of talent and skills is a major obstacle for many enterprises to take containers to production. Beyond extremely large enterprises, container use is still restricted to cloud-native and test and dev applications. Pure Storage will need to raise awareness and create innovation centers for tier 2 enterprises to experiment and understand how they can overcome their storage obstacles to broaden their container adoption. Limitations in the channel community will guide enterprises in their container adoption journeys. Pure Storage will also need to invest in training and upskilling its channel to demonstrate the OpenShift reference architectures and Pure Service Orchestrator to unleash more applications as container- ready candidates. Pure Storage needs to be mindful of competition from all sides. The storage for container market is heating up with traditional vendors as well as container storage start-ups battling for customer mindshare. Pure has an advantage of spotting the trend early on, when it launched the plug-in in 2017 and evolved it to a container storage as a service within a year. It needs to continue to keep up the momentum in innovation and watch adjacent storage technologies such as container-native storage and developments in other storage orchestrators. Watch the container evolution trends. The container orchestration platform itself (such as Kubernetes) could add functionality to further allow the deployment of infrastructure-level components. Although this is possible, beefing up the tool is likely to take long as existing infrastructure is not fully next generation or API enabled to allow this. This feature may also make the orchestrator framework heavy and will take away from the core competency. Opportunities Containers will coexist with virtual machines in the enterprise for the foreseeable future, and enterprises are likely to prefer storage solutions that help them build a continuum using familiar storage provisioning and management interfaces across multi-infrastructures. Pure Storage has taken several strategic steps already, such as collaboration with Red Hat and integration with Kubernetes and Docker. IDC sees Red Hat's OpenShift popularity rising fast across all verticals, and CIOs inform IDC that internal requests from developer teams are for the OpenShift platform. Investing in integration with Red Hat OpenShift and building a reference architecture are a solid first step for Pure. But IDC research shows that on average, about 60% of application estate is Windows based in a typical multinational enterprise, making only 40% of applications relevant for OpenShift, and the migration journey will be a multiyear one for enterprises. Linux is increasingly becoming a preferred platform for modern infrastructure, including hosting traditional as well as next- generation applications. For instance, in the 2012–2017 period, the Windows operating systems and ©2019 IDC #US44857318 11
subsystems market fell by a CAGR of about 5% compared with Linux OSS, growing at a CAGR of
14%. IDC expects more enterprises to choose Linux as they transform their IT environments, but the
Windows installed base is well entrenched and will account for the bulk of the OS market for the
foreseeable future.
Pure Storage needs to explore more alliances and partnerships especially in the PaaS side (AWS,
Google, and Microsoft Azure in particular) to build an ecosystem and reach traditional enterprises
more effectively. IDC believes that vendors that partner well can accelerate the development of their
platforms and instill faith in their customers.
In short, Pure Storage will need to:
▪ Create a rich ecosystem through alliances with PaaS, cloud, and managed cloud services
vendors to broaden TAM beyond Pure Storage's customer accounts.
▪ Offer richer data services such as bringing active cluster capabilities to the container world.
▪ Add object storage services to offer complete storage services as per user demands.
However, a majority of the traditional applications are file- or block based, and Pure's solution
caters to this need.
▪ Support other storage back ends to do multiarray management through a single pane of glass
to differentiate from competition. Doing this can instantaneously differentiate PSO and attract
more enterprises that can turn their existing storage infrastructure into a storage pool for
container environments.
▪ From an engineering perspective, integrate governance-related features around access
controls and security for storage access in the container world to simplify it for developers and
cloud architects who do not have the storage-specific skills of storage administrators.
Containers are a new technology, and enterprises need help in accessing and migrating their existing
application without compromising on cost, performance, and security. Vendors that can help
customers navigate through this containerization and app estate modernization can remain a trusted
partner for their long transformation journey.
ADVICE FOR TECHNOLOGY BUYERS
Enterprises are required to deliver IT services at the speed of their business and, better still, speed of
their customers. After adopting container technology for next-generation cloud-native applications,
enterprises need to quickly evaluate how to accelerate container adoption more broadly if they are to
have a competitive edge. Enterprises need to:
▪ Adopt technologies such as containers for mainstream purposes to support the cloud transition
strategy in an accelerated way.
▪ Understand that container technology is not appropriate for every application, but where
appropriate, it can bring huge benefits. Take stock of application estate and identify the
traditional applications that need to be optimized and containerize them to reduce their
management overheads.
▪ When containerizing an application, consider and address storage, data services, and security
needs of containerized applications right at the onset, not as an afterthought. To remain
competitive and scale containerization, enterprise IT teams need to have container
©2019 IDC #US44857318 12management teams and not storage management teams as infrastructure needs to be
automated, API driven, and integrated with a container management layer.
▪ When evaluating storage solutions, assess whether the offering is future-ready, highly
scalable, container-aware, automated, API-driven, and policy-based.
▪ Keep up with innovation in container technology by training or hiring talent and skills and
continuously improve on the processes and technologies incorporated in a containerized
infrastructure.
▪ Choose a storage infrastructure that can support all their workloads — containerized,
virtualized, or traditional apps — to simplify infrastructure environment.
▪ IDC believes that enterprises will end up with a heterogeneous application landscape, and to
minimize the complexity and cost overheads, they need an infrastructure that can cater to this
broad spectrum of workloads for easy management.
Ultimately, traditional workload modernization is imperative for companywide transformation. In IDC's
opinion, applications that leverage container innovation and combine it with familiar enterprise-grade
storage services that act like an extension to their on-premises infrastructure can make that journey
frictionless and faster.
CONCLUSION
Combining containers and microservices is yielding big benefits because container-based
microservices are faster to build, test, and deploy, with improved agility and application resilience
being the main business benefits. Pure Service Orchestrator can help build microservice-based
applications, platform-as-a-service on-premises, and a CI/CD pipeline powered by containers.
Interest in containers is clearly shifting to the next level, and IDC believes that innovation in adjacent
areas such as storage and security will be key in converting this interest to reality.
IDC also believes that the distinction between "stateless" and "stateful" will blur, and the need for
persistent storage, performance, and persistent data will be fundamental for mass containerization.
On the one hand, basic plug-ins or DAS and traditional NAS/SAN storage offerings are considered a
good-enough choice for some use cases. On the other hand, container-native storage has yet to fully
mature. Until that time arrives, organizations should seriously evaluate container-aware storage services.
Pure Service Orchestrator has all the hallmarks of a modern storage architecture: It is scalable, cloud
and container friendly, software defined, and accessible to developers via APIs that conform to
representational state transfer (REST) architectural style (RESTful APIs) and includes enterprise
standard data management services. IDC believes that the storage industry disruptor is committed to
addressing the fast-evolving persistent storage needs of containerized applications. As enterprises
ponder how to broaden their container adoption strategy, they may want to look at what Pure Storage
offers.
©2019 IDC #US44857318 13About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact- based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. Global Headquarters 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA 508.872.8200 Twitter: @IDC idc-community.com www.idc.com Copyright Notice External Publication of IDC Information and Data — Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason. Copyright 2019 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden.
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