Veeam purchased Kasten, a Kubernetes-orchestrated container data protection startup, for $150 million in cash and stock.

The two companies announced a partnership earlier this year “to offer customers a simple, complete solution for protecting and managing data across cloud, physical, virtual and now Kubernetes-based workloads, addressing a growing need for enterprises,” Phil Goodwin, IDC research director, said in a blog post. 

Gartner has predicted that by 2022, 75% of enterprises will be running containers in production. With an increasing number of cloud-native applications being deployed in Kubernetes environments, the demand for “day two” services such as backup and mobility is only going to increase. The acquisition marks the next step in the companies’ relationship and underscores the markets demand for Kubernetes-native workload protection. 

“Modernizing application delivery is a fundamental shift in philosophy and culture, rather than a simple technology change,” Danny Allan, Veeam CTO and SVP of product strategy wrote in a blog post. “This shift requires modernized cloud data management techniques.”

Kasten entered the data management ecosystem with its K10 product in 2017 backed by Silicon Valley angel investors and executives from Google, Amazon, and Facebook. 

K10 is purpose-built for Kubernetes clusters to provide critical data management services for modern cloud-native applications. It enables enterprises to run stateful applications on Kubernetes. K10 features policy-driven backup, recovery, and migration automation for Kubernetes applications that allows operators to establish rules for policies and data workflows that need to be protected, and it automatically identifies workflows that share the same characteristics, which eliminates the need for manual data management. 

The software offers an application-centric view of data management to balance the needs of operators that control data protection and mobility of the entire application stack with those of developers that focus on core application logic.

In the event of an accidental (or malicious) data deletion or overwriting, K10 can restore an app to its last known good state and repair misconfigurations by restoring artifacts and configurations — even in the event of a security breach or unauthorized manipulations.

Kasten’s K10 platform will be integrated into Veeam Backup and Replication and continue to be available independently, according to the vendor.

Container storage updates and acquisitions were a hot summer item, and it appears that heat is here to stay. Veeam’s purchase follows the movements of competitor Pure Storage, which acquired cloud-native storage provider Portworx in a $370 million, all-cash deal. 

Additionally, Diamanti went deep in the latest update of Spektra with a ready-made appliance that hosts containers, and more importantly, handles the networking and storage requirements for them. Also, NetApp launched Project Astra, an enterprise-class storage and data services platform for Kubernetes that enables both application and data portability.

In June, Rancher Labs made Longhorn available as a cloud-native container storage service. And Intel announced a strategic partnership with Lightbits Labs, the flash-based storage startup that provides non-volatile memory express (NVMe)-based persistent volume storage for Kubernetes.