Startup Offers Combined Container Networking, Storage

Diamanti, a startup previously in stealth, has announced April 19 an appliance that handles the I/O needs of a Docker containerautomatically upon deployment for both storage and networking.

Jeff Chou, cofounder and CEO of Diamanti, is a Cisco veteran. Before creating Diamanti, Cho worked as Cisco's senior director of engineering from 2005 to 2012 and was a leader in Cisco's Unified Computing System(UCS).

Chou, along with several other Cisco veterans now at Diamanti, helped design UCS servers and Nexus switches for Cisco.

Launched in 2009, Cisco's UCS combined virtualized server hardware with Cisco networking. The move offloaded virtual machine-switching traffic from a bottleneck -- the software switch in VMware's ESX hypervisor -- to a hardware switch. This move led to Cisco to become one of the top server manufactures in the IT hardware market.

Chou said that containers are a broadly disruptive technology in the enterprise, and that Diamanti is aiming for a marketplace-changing product similar to UCS for Linux containers by combining networking and storage I/O in a single container appliance.

Putting code in containers is relatively easy. Thousands of developers are doing it, which enables them to move software around and push it forward into testing and quality assurance. But preparing that container for deployment to production with adequate I/O provided for continues to be a headache.

Developers can do that as well, but they need to decide what network and storage interfaces to summon, what storage and network resources to request, and to figure out how to mesh the I/O with other containers on a server.

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