LOS ANGELES – At the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit today, Dell Technologies released an update to its open source container orchestration engine designed to support the recently unveiled Container Storage Interface (CSI) specification.

The newly released Dell REX-Ray v0.1 builds on the CSI specification that was launched earlier this year. REX-Ray includes a “pre-release” version of the CSI 0.1 specification that provides for interoperability between cloud providers and container platforms.

CSI is an application programming interface (API) between container orchestrators and storage providers. This allows for a consistent runtime experience regardless of container orchestrator or storage provider used.

REX-Ray also includes a trio of native CSI storage plugins. The network file system (NFS) plugin supports storage platforms that do not have direct CSI support; a block devices plugin targets on-premises deployments local to a host; and a virtual file system (VFS) driver to support end-to-end CI verification of the CSI specification without requiring a separate storage provider.

Josh Bernstein, vice president of technology at Dell, in a blog post said container orchestrators involved in the CSI project include Mesosphere for its Mesos platform, Google with Kubernetes, Docker, and Pivotal with Cloud Foundry.

For storage vendors, adopting CSI can allow for only needing one plugin to work with supporting container orchestration platforms. The API would handle the interactions, with the storage vendors only responsible for adopting the plugin for their platform.

“By developing and supporting a consistent standard, it is more likely that the storage providers will add support for this capability,” Bernstein wrote. “The more storage providers that support CSI, the faster customers will be able to adopt container technology for a broader range of applications.”

Bernstein described CSI as similar to what the open source Container Networking Interface (CNI) does for handling networking interoperability between containers. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation recently added CNI as a hosted project. Bernstein said Dell was looking for a similar path into CNCF with CSI.

REX-Ray also absorbs Dell Technologies’ libStorage project. LibStorage was originally created by EMC, which merged with Dell last year, to provide a standardized protocol for containers to interface with stored data.