Software-defined solutions company DataCore Software has acquired MayaData, the container-attached storage developer and innovator of OpenEBS, a Kubernetes-native solution. The acquisition comes more than a year after MayaData received a $26 million investment infusion from DataCore, AME Cloud Ventures, and Insight Partners to develop a Kubernetes-based container storage technology. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The acquisition underscores the growing value of container architectures in solving many storage problems that have developed as container workloads increase as well as firmly establishes DataCore in the Kubernetes space. The combination of DataCore and MayaData aims to help medium and large enterprises to simplify container technology with purpose-built storage that meets the manageability and security requirements of cloud-native container-based applications.
“??MayaData’s team will become part of DataCore, and its MayaStor will become a DataCore product,” DataCore President Dave Zabrowski told Enterprise Networking Planet. “Together we will be providing customers with solutions for both architectural approaches to containers: those who want to leverage existing SAN or NAS infrastructure, using products like our SANsymphony and vFILO along with a CSI plug-in—and those who want a container-native storage solution like MayaData, with dedicated storage controllers in the container stack, to achieve portability and the benefits of containerization for the storage component as well.”
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The OpenEBS Factor
OpenEBS, the Kubernetes-native container attached storage solution that was developed by MayaData and later donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), has seen rapid adoption since its launch in 2020. The CNCF 2020 Survey cites OpenEBS as the number one cloud-native storage software used in production. At the end of Q3 2021, OpenEBS had over 600,000 pulls per week—representing 300% growth in eight months—and was the top-ranked container native storage solution being used or evaluated in a recent ad hoc Kubernetes developer poll.
“The community is the reason for the success of OpenEBS, which is the foundation of MayaData,” Zabrowski said. “It is core to our strategy in this market. We will continue to invest engineering resources in advancing OpenEBS, and we will continue to invest talent and time in the community itself. Not just because OpenEBS is the foundation of MayaData, but because the community provides us with millions of users that can give us real-world feedback on the product and contributions to make OpenEBS better. This is in itself a huge competitive advantage over purely commercial solutions and other open-source projects that don’t have the critical mass that OpenEBS already has.”
Datacore began offering a CSI interface back in 2019 to allow IT enterprises to support container-based workloads within their existing infrastructure. IT teams that prefer a native storage interface in the container stack will have OpenEBS as an option.
“OpenEBS has become the de-facto standard for enterprise workloads on Kubernetes. OpenEBS is seeing millions of pulls every month, and every survey shows it has a good lead on other storage technologies, which reflects the technical superiority of its architecture,” said Kiran Mova, architect and maintainer of OpenEBS, who is also co-founder and chief architect at MayaData. “Joining DataCore will accelerate our plans to bring even more attractive capabilities to market.”
MayaData’s platform offers availability, security, and scalability for enterprise-grade container workloads with workload-specific storage and increasing granularity and control. Backed by complete portability across clouds and hybrid environments with its OpenEBS deployments, MayaData users can run production applications on a container stack and streamlined management at scale.
Giving DataCore Greater Reach
Nick Connolly, technical lead for the CNCF Technical Advisory Group on Storage and DataCore’s chief scientist noted that with MayData, “DataCore will have the technical resources to reach a wider community of enterprises, faster, while meeting the strict technical requirements of enterprise applications.”
Indeed, the acquisition of MayaData boosts DataCore’s standing in the cloud-native community, with the expanded portfolio placing the company as the leading independent provider of software-defined storage solutions across block, file, object, HCI, and container-native storage, Zabrowski noted.
“No other company offers this breadth with best-in-class products in each category,” Zabrowski added, “meaning that when a customer brings a challenge to DataCore, we have a complete toolbox to give organizations the right technology for every storage problem, and can be the single vendor to solve all their storage needs.”
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