Today ClusterHQ and Dell announced the availability on GitHub of code that allows ClusterHQ’s Flocker to integrate with the Dell Storage SC Series. What this does is allow developer and operations teams to use existing storage to create portable container-level storage for Docker.
Before we dive into the back story on how the plugin came to be, take a listen to ClusterHQ’s founder and CTO Luke Marsden. Luke explains Flocker, how its being used and talks about the Dell/Flocker driver.
How the plugin came about
Rather than coming from an internal planning process or committee, the idea for a Flocker plugin came from Dell storage coder Sean McGinnis. Sean was looking for ways to make Dell Storage an infrastructure component in an open source environment. Some time back he noticed that Flocker seemed to be a good integration point to allow the use of Dell Storage for users looking to move to containerized solutions.
Sean saw a lot of overlap with what his team was already doing with their OpenStack Cinder driver (both written in Python, with some common storage management concepts). He realized that that they could reuse the majority of this code for a Flocker driver by providing the Flocker driver interface to translate Flocker calls into our storage API. Along with Ian Anderson (another Dell Storage engineer) the pair engaged ClusterHQ to explore requirements for brining Storage Center support to Flocker.
Sean and Ian then worked internally to implement our Flocker driver, open source it and put the code up on GitHub.
The code, storage and beyond
-> You can check out the code and play with it for yourself here on GitHub.
Going forward the team is looking to expand Dell Storage’s open source offerings hosted on GitHub. They see a lot of potential for containers and will continue working in this space to make sure enterprise customers can leverage their storage arrays to support these developing environments.
Beyond storage, Dell is looking to start open sourcing more code and putting it up on GitHub. Don’t expect a deluge right off the bat but hopefully over time you will start seeing more and more.
Extra-credit reading
- The Container Wars Are Under Way As Dell, And Others, Add Flocker Support – Tom’s IT Pro
- Dell works with Cluster HQ to allow Docker containers to leverage Dell Storage – Dell4Enterprise
- Dell Active System Manager code on GitHub
- Incorporating DevOps into the development of Dell’s Active System Manager
Pau for now…
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