For many IT shops, containers and microservices now play a significant role in application development. According to a 2020 IDC survey, more than 50% of companies have deployed containers in their environments, with over 34% citing production deployments¹.

The rapid adoption of containers is not surprising, given the tremendous benefits companies are realizing, such as greater application portability, better resource efficiency and increased developer productivity. However, as companies scale their container environment, they often face challenges such as insufficient skills and uncertain costs. According to a 2020 IBM CP&I Buyer Behavior Study, lack of skills is the most common barrier to containers/microservices adoption, followed by uncertain ROI².

As a result, many organizations have standardized and centralized the management of container-based applications. According to the 2020 IBM CP&I Buyer Behavior Study, 47% of companies use a container management or orchestration solution². Also, the vast majority of organizations report using their incumbent backup vendors to protect their container environment, according to a 2020 Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Research Report³.

That said, while container management and existing data protection solutions have clear operational advantages, they must meet critical IT and application development needs, including support for open standards, developer friendly interfaces, complete data recovery, data security, data resilience and the ability to future-proof companies as they move to hybrid cloud environments.

“IBM recognized the importance of meeting both IT and application development needs for container protection early on. Thanks to a strong collaborative effort between IBM Storage and Red Hat Data Services, we have tightly integrated IBM Spectrum Protect Plus with Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes to strengthen data protection and data resilience in container environments,” says Sam Werner, Vice President, Storage Offering Management, IBM. “As our clients move containerized applications into production, it is critical that we provide data protection that unifies backup and recovery for physical, VM, and containerized environments,” notes Christophe Lesur, CEO, Cloud Temple. “IBM Spectrum Protect Plus delivers true data resilience for containers running in Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes environments. Native integration with Kubernetes increases developer productivity, the ability to protect both persistent volumes and operational metadata ensures complete recovery, and support CSI snapshots gives our clients the flexibility to utilize both existing container-ready storage and container-native storage.”

For more information on how you can use IBM Spectrum Protect Plus to protect containerized applications in Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes environments you can read the blog post, listen to this vodcast, or check out the following resources:

>> Unified approach to data resilience for containers solution brief

>> IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for OpenShift demo

>> IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage deployment guide