Enterprise Container Spending Is Skyrocketing

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A new study from container data services company Portworx, released on the eve of Dockercon 2017, bodes well for container vendors.

Docker and other application container platforms are rapidly gaining traction in enterprise IT environments and spending is following suit. In its survey of 491 IT professionals, Portworx discovered that nearly a third (32 percent) of organizations are poised to spend $500,000 or more on container license and usage fees in 2017. Last year, only five percent were spending as much.

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A majority of companies will be devoting at least part of their IT budgets this year to containers, some crossing into seven-figure territory.

“Sixty-nine percent of respondents with knowledge of their company’s financial investments said their company is making an investment in containers,” stated Portworx in a blog post. “That percentage is up from 52 percent in 2016. Of these companies, 10 percent are making over a million dollar investment in license and usage fees for containers, more than doubling between 2016 and 2017 when the percentage was only four percent.”

Docker is far and away the most popular choice among businesses. Seventy-nine percent of respondents named it their primary container platform. Docker’s influence is also being felt on the Microsoft side of the fence.

When Microsoft shipped Windows Server 2016 last year, the operating system included native support for Docker containers. This year, 29 percent of organizations are running containers on Windows compared to just nine percent last year.

Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool. Forty-three percent of respondents reported using Kubernetes in their environments and nearly a third (32 percent) said it was their go-to solution. “For companies with more than 5,000 employees, Kubernetes is used by 48 percent and the primary orchestration tool for 33 percent,” stated Portworx.

Deploying containers is not without its challenges.

Twenty-six percent of organizations cited persistent storage as the toughest challenge for the second year in a row, followed by data management (13 percent) and cross-datacenter or multi-cloud support (10 percent). Last year, security and networking joined persistent storage in the top three.

In terms of container storage, 46 percent said a lack of satisfactory management tools was a problem. Thirty-nine percent harbored data loss concerns and 26 percent said their storage fails to effectively scale as container counts grow, according to the study.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.