News

Firm Announces Enterprise Containerization Platform

• By David Ramel
• 04/12/2016

The Robin Containerization Platform for Enterprise Applications was announced today by Robin Systems, which said the new offering is the first "application-defined datacenter software platform" in the industry.

The company said the new platform is "application-centric," making the boundaries of servers, storage and virtual machines (VMs) invisible to applications. It claims to be the first company to apply the benefits of containerization to mission-critical applications, including Big Data clusters and databases.

By transforming commodity hardware into a "compute, storage and data continuum," the platform lets multiple applications share a host server or other machine without penalties in performance or predictability, Robin Systems said.

The company's Web site says the platform virtualizes performance-sensitive applications without the overhead of using a hypervisor, and that performance is backed by a quality-of-service guarantee. "Just as a hypervisor abstracts OS from the underlying hardware, containers help abstract applications from OS and everything underneath, leading to simplified application deployment and seamless portability across hardware and operating platforms," the company said.

"Building upon container agility, Robin ensures that even the most complicated distributed applications -- such as Hadoop, or NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and Mongo -- can be deployed within a matter of minutes," Robin Systems said in a statement today. "Quick application clones can be created within seconds, and application-level snapshots allow applications to go back and forth in time for test and dev purposes."

Server failures are kept from affecting applications by the decoupling of compute from storage, which ensures application portability and mobility without the need to move or copy data. The platform is also said to quicken and simplify application deployment and lifecycle management.

"Robin has been put through its paces across a wide spectrum of use cases, from those with a basic handful of nodes to extra-large footprints of tens of petabytes (PB) of shared storage across several applications," said CEO Premal Buch. "Our early adopters have seen phenomenal results, including 10x agility gain, 50 percent reduction in hardware footprint and costs, and significant performance gains. We are excited to bring to market this transformative product that heralds a truly new era in datacenter evolution."