Bryce Cracco, NetApp and Jim Sarale, Rancher Labs | CUBE Conversation, December 2020
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2020-12-08

Bryce Cracco, Product Manager, NetApp and Jim Sarale, Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances, Rancher Labs sit down with John Furrier at theCUBE Digital studios for a CUBE Conversation.

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https://siliconangle.com/2020/12/08/containers-could-find-easy-way-into-enterprises-through-rancher-netapp-deal-cubeconversations/

Containers could find easy way into enterprises through Rancher, NetApp deal

BY R. DANES

Where can one go to escape the hype over containers? Enterprises, at least for the moment. Considering containers’ rep as the panacea for everything from multicloud to agile DevOps, enterprise adoption remains lower than one would expect. Will a meeting and mingling of containers and more traditional data-center IT speed up adoption? 

Companies know the gains in agility, iteration and portability achievable through containers. But bringing them into the mainstream of slow-moving, risk-averse enterprise IT departments can still be a challenge, according to Bryce Cracco (pictured, left), product manager at NetApp Inc. 

“I think that’s what everyone’s trying to solve right now,” Cracco said. 

Cracco and Jim Sarale (pictured, right), vice president of global channels and alliances at Rancher Labs Inc., spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed the state of container adoption and the announcement of an OEM partnership between NetApp and Rancher. (* Disclosure below.) 

Tipping the scale with Kubernetes on HCI
Hyperconverged infrastructure once helped bring virtualization to a lot of companies in a manageable package.

“Kubernetes is becoming table stakes in the enterprise, so I think we’re seeing … Kubernetes [becoming] that top layer rather than just virtualization,” Cracco said.

One weakness of HCI solutions in the past has been around scale. An HCI solution that makes containerizing workloads attractive to enterprises would have to be both relatively simple and scalable, Cracco explained. Kubernetes, of course, is a container orchestrator engineered to cut out much manual work involved in scaling containerized apps. Deliver it on top of a NetApp’s versatile HCI solution that runs anything from legacy ERP to bespoke modern apps, and you might just strike the balance enterprises want.
Rancher, which also makes software for managing Kubernetes at scale — has nearly 500 customers covering the gamut of environments, according to Sarale.

“We’re an agnostic play for those that are trying to leverage Kubernetes,” he said. 

The companies, through their OEM partnership, have embedded Rancher’s code into NetApp’s HCI product. Joint support is available for a fee, but otherwise, there is no incremental cost to use Rancher’s open-source software on NetApp’s HCI, according to Cracco. This gives enterprises a very low-risk entry into containers and Kubernetes.

“You can kind of think of it as an indefinite trial period in a way,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (*Disclosure: Rancher Labs Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Rancher Labs nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)