Competition or Coopetition in the Persistent Storage Market?

Rancher Labs’ recent launch of Longhorn was in response to DevOps’ distress call for a cloud-native persistent storage solution for Kubernetes. At the time, industry pundit Chris Mellor posted that the company had entered into direct competition with its partners Portworx and Storage OS.

A healthy dose of coopetition may be more like it. From the perspective of Rancher Labs CEO Sheng Liang and Portworx CEO, Murli Thirumale, the secret to the evolution of the storage market, in this container-centric landscape, is collaboration, rather than all-out competition.

Longhorn – the easy-to-deploy, enterprise-grade Kubernetes storage solution – was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project in 2019. It enables any enterprise running any Kubernetes cluster to run stateful workloads on Kubernetes clusters anywhere. Since then, the two companies have been collaborating closely to address the storage challenges facing this industry.

In this interview with TheCube’s Stu Miniman, recorded during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, Sheng and Murli discuss the evolution of Kubernetes storage and how industry players must come together for the benefit of the open source community and industry at large.

Learn more about persistent storage with Longhorn.