DataCore Software, a vendor of Software-Defined Storage solutions, has announced it will acquire MayaData, the developer of OpenEBS and MayaStor. The move follows a joint venture between the two companies in January 2020 that included funding, technology licensing, transfer of the DataCore container team to MayaData, and seats on the board of directors for DataCore’s CEO and primary investors. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
As more container workloads enter production, Container-Attached Storage has generated significant interest for elegantly solving the problems of storage persistence, portability and performance that remain with container native approaches. OpenEBS is a Kubernetes-native Container Attached Storage solution that has generated enthusiasm among the cloud community and was adopted as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) initiative shortly thereafter its version 1.0 release.
Since then, the OpenEBS platform has seen dramatic adoption and rapid advancements in capabilities including MayaStor, the super-high-performance engine. The CNCF 2020 Survey cites OpenEBS as the #1 cloud-native storage software used in production. At the end of Q3, OpenEBS has over 600,000 pulls per week – which represents 300% growth in 8 months – and was the top ranked container native storage solution being used or evaluated in a recent ad hoc Kubernetes developer poll. DataCore will continue to support and invest in OpenEBS and the community around it, as it accelerates product development and go to market activities.
With over half of IT organizations deploying containers in production, DataCore and its MayaData offerings now can help medium and large enterprises to simplify container technology with storage that’s purpose built for the scalability, availability, manageability, and security workload requirements of cloud-native container-based applications.
At the same time, DataCore can provide a one-stop shop resource for enterprise software-defined storage needs including block, file, and object storage. MayaData will benefit from DataCore’s engineering expertise, broad IP and patent portfolio, go-to-market muscle, award-winning support organization, and deep relationships with DataCore’s channel.
In early 2019 DataCore became one of the first companies to offer a CSI interface for software-defined storage, as the company recognized the importance of containers in the future, and the value of standardizing on a community-led interface like CSI. IT organizations that prefer to support container-based workloads with their existing infrastructure can do so with the CSI interface for SANsymphony. Alternately, cloud-native teams that prefer a native storage interface in the container stack will find a great option in OpenEBS.
“MayaData inside DataCore will have the technical resources to reach a wider community of enterprises, faster, while meeting the strict technical requirements of enterprise applications,” said Nick Connolly, technical lead for the CNCF Technical Advisory Group on Storage and DataCore’s chief scientist.
“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 production customers include Bloomberg, Flipkart, Optoro, and more. Its platform makes it simple to achieve 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 gain exceptional performance and streamlined management at scale, backed by 24/7 support. With the addition of DataCore’s field-proven storage solutions, optimizations for NVMe, and tuning, MayaData customers can run stateful workloads on Kubernetes, move faster and save on IT costs.
“The rapid proliferation of containers has elevated the importance of IT teams finding the right container storage to fit application requirements,” said Dave Raffo, senior analyst at Evaluator Group. “That has led to the emergence of container-native storage, designed for DevOps’ storage and data services requirements. DataCore is moving into this space by acquiring MayaData and OpenEBS, and pledges to put its engineering force behind delivering OpenEBS MayaStor as a hardened enterprise product.”
“With this acquisition, DataCore is proud to remain the independent software-defined storage vendor with the broadest product offering spanning block, file, object, HCI, and now container-native storage – and the deepest IP portfolio, expertise, and technology,” said David Zabrowski, CEO of Datacore. “We are committed to investing in OpenEBS as an open-source technology, and expanding the community of users, developers, and contributors around it, while providing a streamlined path to leveraging container storage fast, easily and affordably. You’ll be hearing from us soon with additional solutions for this space.”