ClusterHQ picks EMC as friend with benefits for Flocker release

ClusterHQ has inked an agreement that will see its Flocker container management code integrate with EMC's flashy fare.

Flocker is container data management tool that aims to orchestrate containers so that several can be assembled into something that looks, feels and behaves pretty much like an application. Flocker also allows containers to bring their data with them, a more-than-useful approach because it means database operations won't be disrupted by new or retiring containers. It also means that data and a container can be resident on the same host, which speeds things up nicely.

Making data available to lots of containers assembled into “microservices” works best when the underlying infrastructure is swift enough to handle lots of containers running at once and lots of containers being spawned and retired. That speed is easier to find if you you use either server-side flash array or flash array.

Enter EMC with ScaleIO and XtremIO, which it feels can meet Flocker's demands. ClusterHQ does too, because it yesterday released a full 1.0 version of Flocker, complete with drivers that treat the two EMC products as shared storage. ClusterHQ's not made this arrangement with any other storage vendor and while it plans to thinks it'll do well by having EMC on the list from day one.

EMC, for its part, thinks that being able to go Flock itself on day one gives it a better microservices story. And everybody wants one of those given the current enthusiasm for containers, microservices and DevOps to iterate both more quickly than is possible with tightly-coupled application architectures. ®