MapR introduces the Converged Data Platform for Docker

“We are using containers with the MapR Platform across all our applications to drive agility in a fast development environment,” said Gerard Paulke, enterprise architect, Quantium. “The ability to change direction rapidly for testing new software or deploying an application is a key advantage for us.  MapR gives Quantium the speed, scale and efficiency that enables us to apply rigorous analytical techniques to consumer transaction data for a wide range of industries including retail, financial services and media.”

“MapR is the leader in the converged data platform space, and Mesosphere DC/OS is the premier platform for modern apps that makes running containers, data services, and microservices easy,” said Edward Hsu, vice president product marketing, Mesosphere. “MapR’s recent innovation to make its platform available in a containerised setup expands the already broad set of backing data services that work on DC/OS.  We’re excited to see MapR embracing containers and together explore the opportunities that this move opens up.”

Until now, only point solutions for file or block storage have been available with no comprehensive, secure data services for stateful containers.  Enterprises are moving toward using container applications in production, but struggle to achieve anything more complex than a stateless web application. The biggest blocker today is the lack of data persistence, because without it applications cannot scale elastically to meet business requirements and cannot survive routine infrastructure failures, maintenance windows.

“Agile enterprises today need their operational and analytical apps and microservices to be “stateful” or aware of not just the “now”, but historical information and context as well.  Approaches where developers are required to deploy dedicated data management and streaming services slow implementation and impede flexibility.”  said John L Myers, managing research director, Enterprise Management Associates – a Boulder Colo based industry analysis firm.  “Focusing application developers on application logic and functions, speeds development and adds to implementation agility. The MapR Converged Platform empowers the deployment of stateful containerised applications via shared, multi-tenant data and streaming services.”

Capabilities for stateful applications supported by the MapR Converged Data Platform for Docker include:

·        Secure, reliable, high-performance data storage for configuration, logging, and binary state

·        Scale out NoSQL K/V and Document Database storage for operational and light weight analytics.

·        Global event streams with persistence for inter-microservice communication state

“MapR today ushered in a new era for containers by releasing both a client container image and container-optimised data platform which gives enterprise all of the data services they need to support not only stateful applications, but also serve as a strategic platform to support microservices, and inter-microservice communication,” said Jack Norris, senior vice president, data & applications, MapR Technologies.

The new MapR Converged Data Platform for Docker enables fast access of any data from any underlying infrastructure resource.  This container-optimised environment includes the new MapR Persistent Application Client Container (PACC), providing the following:

·        A pre-built Docker container that provides application access to files, database tables, and streams.

·        Secure authentication at the container level

·        Scalable, high performance

·        Extensible support for application layers