In the Age of Kubernetes, Kasten Emerges to Reinvent Data Management for Enterprises

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Kasten Enables Enterprises to Build, Deploy and Manage Stateful Containerized Applications at Scale With Introduction of its K10 Platform and Open Source Project Kanister

LOS ALTOS, Calif. and AUSTIN, Texas, Dec. 05, 2017 — /BackupReview.info/ — Today at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Kasten, the cloud-native data management company, emerged from stealth and released its K10 platform. K10 uses a novel application-centric approach to enable enterprises to meet business continuity and compliance requirements around stateful container based applications running at scale on public and private Kubernetes deployments. Additionally, the company announced an open source project called Kanister – an extensible framework for application-level data management. Kasten K10 and Kanister are used by enterprises, including a top 10 retailer in Europe and a leading global telecommunications provider.

The company is backed by well-known Silicon Valley angels and executives from Google, Amazon and Facebook. These include Amarjit Gill, who has more than $2 billion in exists as a serial founder plus multiple large exists as an investor, as well as Amit Singh, founder of Osmeta which Facebook acquired, and Dan Dobberpuhl, who is a serial entrepreneur and microprocessor luminary.

Amarjit Gill said: “Containerization of the enterprise is occurring at more accelerated pace than any other infrastructure change, including the transition to virtual machines. With this shift, enterprise-grade data management for cloud-native environments has emerged as a key area for IT organizations. I am honored to once again support this experienced enterprise-focused leadership team, and I believe that they are well positioned to capitalize on this massive opportunity.”

Kasten was founded by Niraj Tolia (CEO) and Vaibhav Kamra (VP of Engineering), who bring deep technical expertise in the areas of containers, Kubernetes, storage and distributed systems. Previously they held senior leadership positions and delivered multiple enterprise-ready solutions at companies like Maginatics (acquired by EMC), Dell EMC, HPE and Microsoft.

“Kasten was founded to solve the data management pain we experienced firsthand in working with stateful applications in containerized environments,” said Niraj Tolia, Kasten co-founder and CEO. “Kasten’s mission is to eliminate the friction and adoption roadblocks observed with enterprises when working with persistent state in container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. Our application-centric K10 platform has been purpose built to bridge both the tools and DevOps gap and reinvent cloud-native data management for the enterprise.”

Data management is the real hurdle for stateful workloads
Enterprises have derived tremendous business value from the agility, resiliency and portability that cloud-native platforms have unlocked. While running stateless application in this fashion has become commonplace, IT organizations are still struggling with the transition for stateful workloads which make up a significant portion of the traditional enterprise applications in production today. Having largely overcome the initial hurdles around storage provisioning in containerized environments, enterprises experience pain points related to ongoing data management and satisfying business continuity and compliance requirements which are inevitable with persistent data.

While the challenges partly stem from the fact that existing data management tools are very infrastructure and VM-focused and do not effectively translate to a cloud-native world, the primary issue is that proper data lifecycle management is at odds with most implementations of the DevOps model in the enterprise. Operators do not have the visibility and tools to do data management at scale, while relying on developers to address these requirements with sufficient depth is sub-optimal and insufficient. The result is ad-hoc and error prone processes without clear ownership which inevitably crumble at scale, impede business agility and often lead to severe production issues including data loss.

Kasten K10 is ops focused and dev friendly
Kasten addresses these challenges by introducing a unique application-centric data management platform. Starting with the application but also deeply integrating with the infrastructure, the solution balances the needs of both operators and developers. Operators control data protection and mobility for the entire application stack via dynamic policies and have global visibility into business requirements compliance. Developers can choose the most appropriate data store and remain focused on core application logic but are able to extend the platform to meet custom requirements using Kanister when needed. As a result, enterprises are finally free to fully adopt and reap the benefits of cloud-native platforms regardless of the type of workload.

“There has been a tremendous developer adoption of containers and cloud-native infrastructure over the last two years. However, to gain full production acceptance in the enterprise, containers need to work just as well for the needs of IT operations since a lot of the traditional IT requirements still apply, just in a much more dynamic and granular way,” said Torsten Volk, EMA, Managing Director. “Kasten K10 is a product that balances developer and operator focus and helps address the tools and skills gap that has emerged in this ecosystem.”

Key Capabilities

• Policy-driven Automation – In a cloud-native environment, applications come and go rapidly and scale dynamically. Even though IT operators may not be involved in some of these transitions, Kasten K10 makes it possible to proactively define policies and data management workflows that will be triggered automatically for both existing and future applications.
• Compliance Monitoring – Kasten K10 provides a unified view of data management operations across applications in a cloud-native environment. More specifically, it enables operators to monitor the compliance metrics they are responsible for and easily identify applications that need attention.
• Data Protection – Kasten K10 offers facilities for robust application-centric data protection. The platform captures and orchestrates life cycle management operations for both application configuration and persistent data. The Kanister framework allows for deep integration with specific applications.
• Data Mobility and Manipulation – To truly harness the power of cloud-native environments, stateful applications need to be fully portable, including the persistent data component. Kasten K10 delivers foundational mechanisms for moving data sets and performing customer-defined transformations.

Use Cases

• Test/Dev Workflows – The ability to provide developers with a high-fidelity replica of their production environment is key for identifying and correcting problems early. Kasten K10 simplifies the process of re-creating dev and test environments, while providing enterprise grade features like data masking and access controls.
• Backup and Recovery – While modern applications often utilize redundant highly-available data stores that are not susceptible to single point of failure, Kasten K10 layers the ability to protect and recover data in cases of accidental or malicious data loss, a key requirement for enterprises. Further, K10 enables the modernization of traditional applications by removing data protection operational roadblocks.
• Cloud Migration – For a number of reasons, including but not limited to achieving additional agility and resiliency or unlocking savings potential, enterprises are looking for workload portability. Kasten K10 makes it possible to move an entire application stack, including the data, within different regions of the same cloud and across public or private clouds.
• Disaster Recovery – Providing business continuity in the case of catastrophic failure remains a table stakes requirement for enterprises. Kasten K10 dramatically simplifies the ability to recover from outages by enabling policy based replication of data and application state between clusters for fast orchestrated recovery.

Availability
Kasten K10 is available starting today. For more information, visit Kasten at www.kasten.io. To download Kanister, go to https://github.com/kanisterio

About Kasten
Kasten reinvents the data management toolset for the modern cloud-native infrastructure for the purpose of empowering enterprises to easily build, deploy and manage stateful containerized applications at scale. Founded in 2017 by experts in the areas of Kubernetes, storage and distributed systems, Kasten is headquartered in Los Altos, CA. For more information, visit www.kasten.io or follow @kastenhq on Twitter.

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Source: Kasten

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