Guests: Sathya Sankaran (LinkedIn) | Richard Olver (LinkedIn)
Companies: CloudCasa by Catalogic (Twitter)| Ondat (Twitter)

Ondat and CloudCasa by Catalogic have joined forces to offer customers a combined solution stack to run and manage stateful applications on Kubernetes and provide best-of-breed performance, availability, data protection and recovery. In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with the executives of both companies, Catalogic COO Sathya Sankaran and Ondat CEO Richard Olver, to talk about their partnership.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Ondat has been active in the ecosystem for some time working with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with the goal of being open and integrated with a variety of different platforms, different Kubernetes providers, and backup. It has been working closely with CloudCasa since inception and has achieved certified integration. Now, they’re collaborating on a joint go-to-market.
• Ondat enables customers to run stateful applications at scale. To maintain state, you need to have great storage, high availability, and great performance. But you also need to have good backups, which is what CloudCasa provides. What they both do go hand in hand.
• On the storage side of the ecosystem, Olver is seeing an increasing number of critical workloads, including financial and telco, moving into Kubernetes. The more critical the workload, the more important it is to have good backup and recovery. Ondat working with CloudCasa makes complete sense.
• Even though Kubernetes’ lineage is all about stateless applications, CNCF surveys indicate that stateful applications are growing at an even faster rate than people adopting Kubernetes itself. This is because everybody sees once they go into production, they need to run stateful applications. CloudCasa is an essential service to enable those stateful mission-critical applications to run.
• One of the primary drivers for moving data into Kubernetes is to reduce cost. Companies are moving away from managed database offerings and legacy systems into Kubernetes.
• CloudCasa and Ondat collectively put together a compliant offering with joint documentation to help the customer or the engineer or platform engineer self-serve and adopt the solution quite easily. To lower the barrier to entry, they have a joint freemium offering that allows developers to use their solution at no cost and then grow through consumption.
• According to Architecting IT’s benchmark comparison report, Ondat delivered the most efficient performance for throughput and latency among several storage solutions. It is platform-independent and has no kernel modules that add complexity in terms of data operations.
• GigaOm Radar named CloudCasa a Leader and Outperformer in Kubernetes data protection. It provides the ability to spin up an entire cluster with all of the cloud configurations and everything intact. It can handle VPC configurations, load balancers, ingress controllers, node ports with storage classes, and more. A huge differentiation is the ability to spin up clusters in a full stack.
• Both companies share the same customer persona: their customers (i.e., developers, platform engineers, DevOps engineers) don’t want to talk to traditional storage salespeople, they want to self-serve. They want great documentation. If they need help, they need to speak to a Kubernetes expert to figure out how to architect a solution for Kubernetes. Both CloudCasa and Ondat are Kubernetes experts and that’s what makes their combined solution unique.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.