Red Hat’s container push continues with an announced update to its storage component. This follows the recent update to the Red Hat OpenShift Container platform.

The newly announced Container-Native Storage 3.6 update is designed to further ease software-defined storage (SDS) use for containers. CNS is built on Red Hat’s Gluster Storage SDS platform.

New CNS features allow customers to manage, scale, and upgrade their storage needs using a single control plane. Irshad Raihan, senior manager of product marketing at Red Hat’s storage team, said support also now includes file, block, and object interfaces, which offers greater container application portability.

“Developers in the past had to have their admin carve out some storage for their apps,” Raihan said. “We are now in a world where storage is dynamically provisioned. And this can now happen seamlessly in OpenShift. Developers are not having to wait on admin to allow for storage. This allows for a more seamless move between dev to test to production.”

The latest CNS update also offers increased persistent volume density to support better resource utilization. Raihan said the product shows a three-fold increase in the number of applications and microservices deployed on a single cluster.

“More persistent volumes allow developers to be closer to their goal of storage being as-a-service, highly elastic, and not holding them back,” Raihan said.

The storage update follows the 3.6 update to Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform announced in August. The storage product is embedded within the container platform.

The latest CNS update is expected to be available later this month.

Raihan said the container storage market was still evolving, with many organizations just now realizing the diverse needs required by their deeper push into cloud platforms.

“Eighteen months ago, storage was not a pain point for the earliest of adopters,” Raihan said. “They had not gotten to that point yet. Once they got to the point where they needed persistent storage, they finally realized the need.”

As for the SDS market, Raihan noted it was still not to the level of mainstream adoption, but “it’s getting to be an easier conversation to have.”

That growing need has attracted an endless number of new entrants and enhanced platforms from established players. Raihan considers Red Hat as part of the latter group, which he feels has a leg up on the former.

“Some SDS vendors out there are either startups with limited expertise in what they can bring to the table,” he said. “Enterprises also don’t want to have to deal with another vendor if possible. … They want to have that one throat to choke.”