DH2i has announced general availability of DxEnterprise container management software for Microsoft Windows Server applications and workloads. DxEnterprise "containerizes" Windows Server application instances, enabling the decoupling of the apps and associated data from the host OS and underlying physical infrastructure.
"With DxEnterprise, customers can ‘containerize’ and make any new or existing Windows Server app service, file share, or Microsoft SQL Server instance portable and highly available, with the native dynamic NTFS volumes following the workload - all with just a few clicks," said OJ Ngo, CTO and co-founder, DH2i. "The results include a reduction in software and infrastructure costs of 30%-60% and the elimination of significant lifecycle management expense - and headache. It also eliminates OS sprawl and reduces OS cost by 8-15 times, and provides near zero application downtime as well as protection from OS, application and infrastructure faults."
DxEnterprise software decouples Windows Server application instances from a physical server, virtual machine (VM) or cloud server via its lightweight container called a virtual host, or Vhost. Each Vhost consists of a logical computer name, an associated IP address (or addresses), Vhost management metadata, and portable native NTFS volumes. The metadata within the Vhost coordinates container workload management and directs the managed application to launch and run locally. DxEnterprise containers share a single Windows Server OS instance and are then stacked on virtual or physical servers, providing significant consolidation and application instance portability.
According to the vendor, DxEnterprise offers management capabilities that add to the container technology, including automation and orchestration, in order to drive substantially higher efficiency and provide a self-healing environment that reduces risk, both within and between containers. This enables organizations to create policies that ensure application-level SLAs. And, in the event that the managed application encounters insufficient resources, DxEnterprise can automatically move the lowest priority workloads to compensate for the the resource shortfall. The management software will also issue alerts if workloads fail to meet performance thresholds or for any defined level of criticality.
"'Containers' has become a popular buzzword in the industry, but usually in the context of Linux. DxEnterprise is focused on applying container technology to Windows applications, and that in itself differentiates this product," noted Al Gillen, program vice president, Servers and System Software, IDC. "DxEnterprise brings portability to application instances in a Windows environment, and to ease adoption, it can lift applications off of an existing deployment. IDC expects that containers will become a popular packaging technology in the near future."