Private cloud infrastructure provider Datrium is stepping outside its historical VMware comfort zone with new storage support for various open source platforms.

The company said it’s adding support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers and kernel virtual machines (KVM) to its core software platform. The platform currently supports VMware servers and vSphere virtual machines.

Datrium said with the update, it can run both environments on a single system with a single management view. The company explained this can reduce operating costs and allow for use of multiple hypervisors.

Craig Nunes, VP of marketing at Datrium, said the company moved on the update because it did not see options for hyperconverged platforms that supported a mixed hypervisor and bare metal environment across VMware and Red Hat virtualization environments.

“Our aim is to simplify the installation, deployment, and management of private cloud infrastructure by consolidating these environments on a single, converged platform,” said Nunes.

In a recent report, 451 Research described Datrium’s “unusual” DVX architecture as “similar to – and at the same time very different from – both hyperconverged and conventional standalone storage.”

Datrium updates also included storage support for stateful Linux containers and Docker persistent volumes on bare-metal or in virtualized deployments. Typically, containers run in a stateless form, with data storage handled by the container management platform and not by the running container.

Datrium said the support would allow for end-to-end encryption and cloud data management on a per-container basis. It also claims a container persistent volume cloned on one compute node could be immediately used on another compute node.

“There are very limited options for container-centric data management, particularly if users are looking for a single infrastructure platform to address today's needs at a VM level as well as tomorrow's needs at a [bare metal] container level,” said Nunes.

As for managing the potential for large amounts of data running inside of container deployments, Datrium said it has advanced search capabilities. It also offers the ability to create groups of containers aligned to customer applications, and assignment of protection policies to those groups to allow for recovery and archiving.

Nunes said this was a benefit “for users who might be faced with managing literally thousands of container persistent volumes.”

Datrium said its updated software platform would be available next month, priced at $12,000 per compute node.

The platform updates garnered applause from analysts, who noted benefits for enterprises being able to manage multiple environments from a single source.

Mike Matchett, senior analyst at Taneja Group, said the Datrium approach is a “good option” for enterprises “to consider in order to accelerate and open up existing compute clusters.”

“It represents a safe, forward-looking investment even if you are focused on just VMware today,” Matchett said. “Given that storage refresh cycles are traditionally three to five years, it’s a big risk these days to not build in some agility and adaptability into a current refresh.”

Matchett did note the firm would have to show it can scale to the needs of larger enterprise customers.

“Datrium will need to prove out yet large-scale scalability and protection claims, but significant performance improvement with server side flash is almost assured,” Matchett said.

Datrium, which was founded in 2012, late last year scored $55 million in Series C funding, boosting its capital haul to $110 million since its founding.