Ending an extended beta period that began in November, ContainerX, of San Jose, Calif., today announced the general availability of its Linux and Windows product to manage Docker containers. Called simply ContainerX, the product is usable by large organizations and supports multi-tenancy, providing a single “delightfully familiar” VMware-like interface to all containers, said CEO and co-founder Kiran Kamity in an interview.
ContainerX is significant because it may make containers less foreign to the IT administrators who must manage them once enthusiastic developers create them. It protects from rogue containers crashing or starving each other and regulates pools of CPU and memory, he said.
“If you have a heterogeneous environment, with a combination of bare metal and VMs, and public and on-premises computing, then you need what we provide,” Kamity said. “We let any VM adminstrator be a container administrator.” He described ContainerX as the second generation of container management, the first generation having handled only single-tenant Linux apps.
ContainerX, now about 1.5 years old, is Kamity’s third startup, he said, adding, “This is the fast of them to go to general availability with paying customers.” So far the product has 25 beta installs, with two paying customers as of early June.
One of the first customers is Advantage24, a service provider with several data centers in Tokyo, ContainerX said. ContainerX has “built the beginnings of an excellent product,” Terry Warren, Advantage24’s co-founder, said in a prepared release.
Competitors include Docker’s own Datacenter and CoreOS’s Tectonic, Kamity said.
A free version of ContainerX manages up to 100 cores. Pricing is $25,000 per year for 101-500 cores and $70,000 for 501-1,000 cores.
