ClusterHQ Collaborates With EMC to Enable Enterprise-Grade Applications With Docker Containers

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 17, 2015) - ClusterHQ, The Container Data People, today announced integration between ClusterHQ's Flocker container data management software and EMC Corporation's (NYSE: EMC) EMC® ScaleIO® and EMC XtremIO™ storage solutions. As a result, developers and operations (DevOps) teams can architect and manage high performance, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective persistent storage backends for Docker-based applications. EMC collaborated with ClusterHQ to develop pluggable storage drivers for ScaleIO and XtremIO solutions that enable flexible and portable shared storage for Docker. Organizations can easily take advantage of the portability and massive per-server density benefits inherent in containers, while still deploying EMC's advanced storage solutions. Through this collaboration, users will now have easy, direct access to ScaleIO and XtremIO storage volumes at the container level.

"Innovative enterprises recognize that containers are very effective for building and maintaining microservices, and EMC is committed to making it easier for our customers to leverage the power of containers within their modern IT architectures," said Ken Durazzo, VP of advanced research and development in the office of the CTO at EMC Corporation. "By collaborating with ClusterHQ to make ScaleIO and XtremIO storage drivers available for Flocker, we're supporting the convergence of storage, cloud and open source platforms for the developer communities responsible for driving innovation in the enterprise."

By enabling stateful Docker containers to be easily migrated between servers, or racks, Flocker enables app developers and DevOps teams to deploy and run multi-container distributed applications that include databases, queues and key value stores. Many modern applications are built from both stateless and stateful microservices; Flocker makes it simple and practical for entire applications, including their data, to be containerized and achieve true portability between development, staging and production. The integration with XtremIO's all-flash array is designed to allow enterprises to centralize local storage for Docker containers and provide superior performance, failover and high availability capabilities, as well as backup and restore capability for both the container and its associated storage.

Joint EMC, ClusterHQ Customer Adopts Containers for Increased Per-Server Density and Significantly Decreased Costs
Swisscom, Switzerland's leading ICT provider, implemented Flocker with EMC ScaleIO as part of a major new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) initiative to make it easier than ever for businesses and consumers to build, run and use applications. Its mission-critical data services are run in Docker containers. With Flocker, Swisscom is able to use EMC ScaleIO as its persistent storage backend, gaining both scale-out storage for its microservices and seamless data portability between physical and virtual servers, thereby improving operational management and increasing density of distributed server-hosted applications. 

"Swisscom has been watching Linux-based containers since their beginning. We believe that lightweight containers can provide significant benefits to major service providers, including dramatically higher density of applications per server. That means greater efficiency, decreased costs and higher flexibility," said Marco Hochstrasser, head of Swisscom Application Cloud. "We decided to use Docker containers for a major new initiative, but as we investigated options, we realized that without a solution for persistent container data management we wouldn't be able to achieve the benefits we sought. When we saw Flocker from ClusterHQ we knew we had found a compelling open source solution."

"As the popularity of microservice architectures increases, containers give DevOps teams a way to simplify the creation, iteration and management of applications," said Mark Davis, CEO of ClusterHQ. "Together with EMC, we open up the use of Docker to a larger set of applications and enterprise use cases, and allow our mutual customers to more quickly join the container movement."

In addition to this news, ClusterHQ today announced the general availability of Flocker 1.0, its container data management software, as well as the compelling findings from a recent third-party survey regarding current and planned adoption of container technology across organizations of all sizes. To learn more about Flocker 1.0 visit clusterhq.com/flocker; to access the survey and report visit https://clusterhq.com/assets/pdfs/state-of-container-usage-june-2015.pdf.

During DockerCon 2015, June 22 - 23 in San Francisco, learn about ClusterHQ's Flocker 1.0 at Booth G8 and come hear Luke Marsden, CTO of ClusterHQ speak on Monday, June 22 at 2:50 PM PT.

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About ClusterHQ
ClusterHQ builds container data management software that enables broader adoption of container technology in production environments. DevOps teams worldwide rely on ClusterHQ's open source Flocker software to meet the data portability requirements of distributed, microservices-based applications. Available for download at clusterhq.com/flocker, Flocker enables containers and their associated data volumes to be easily moved between servers as a single unit, a prerequisite for production operation of stateful application components in containers. Flocker facilitates widespread production deployment of containers for databases, queues and key value stores by making it simple and practical for entire distributed applications to be consolidated into an all-container development and operations environment. No matter where, or what, a container is running, Flocker gives DevOps teams operational freedom to quickly react to market conditions by relocating application containers in response to changing conditions, so that their business can innovate faster and be more responsive. Flocker increases the value of an organization's container investment and opens the door for a greater variety of mainstream enterprise use cases. Organizations can now embrace the portability and massive per-server density benefits of containers for stateful application services, enabling the creation of a new generation of microservices-based applications, and in some cases the replacement of virtual machines with containers. ClusterHQ provides the tools and services necessary for deploying and managing fully containerized stateful applications, simplifying IT processes and delivering on the advantages inherent in containers. We are the Container Data People™.

EMC, ScaleIO and XtremIO are trademarks or registered trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries.