infoTECH Feature

June 29, 2016

Container Firm Rancher Labs Extends Supports, Gets New Funding

There has been a lot of discussion about container orchestration lately. Indeed, container pioneer Docker last week announced it has integrated orchestration functionality into the most recent version of Docker Engine.

Orchestration tools create clusters of containers so users can deploy more complex applications. But what manages those clusters of containers, and enables different teams to access the clusters? That’s an area in which Rancher Labs specializes.

Rancher Labs just last month announced it had raised $20 million in Series B funding led by new investor GRC SinoGreen. Existing investors Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this new round.

“We are seeing a lot of attention and demand for our Rancher platform and feel it is due to our unique approach to container management,” Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs, said in announcing the funding. “Containerization has enabled organizations to do amazing things to improve application performance, availability, and cost. The next pieces of this puzzle, which will really help to perfect container technologies, are the tools around the management of containers. We are excited to continue efforts in furthering our goal of providing users with the right tools to take advantage of container technologies, and the financial and organizational benefits they promise.”

I sat down last week at DockerCon with Liang and Shannon Williams, vice president of sales and marketing, at Rancher Labs to learn more about container management and Rancher Labs.

Rancher Labs provides an open source management platform that some of the largest companies in the world use to manage their container clusters, said Williams. Liang added that 10 percent of all the containers in production in the world leverage Rancher Labs technology.

The company in the past has supported Docker Swarm and Kubernetes container environments. Earlier this month Rancher Labs announced its support for Mesos as well.

“The combination of the Apache Mesos scheduler and Rancher container management platform is a big win for users,” said Josh Bernstein, vice president of technology at the emerging technology division of EMC (News - Alert) Corp. “With the integration of these two open source projects, organizations will be able to spin up Mesos clusters in minutes on any infrastructure, and easily schedule and deploy workloads.”

There is a lot of fragmentation in the container arena given the availability and prevalence of Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker technologies, Williams added. However, Rancher Labs helps address that by allowing developers to just write once to make their applications work.

Going forward, Rancher Labs plans to integrate Docker 1.12 with its built-in Swarm orchestration into the company’s own technology. It expects to preview a version of that integration early next month.

Williams said Rancher Labs is also working to extend automation to allow for autoscaling based on holes in demand, and to support more big enterprise frameworks such as EMC and NetApp.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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