Only a few weeks after entering an agreement to help Microsoft Corp. bring its namesake data center orchestration framework to Windows, Mesosphere Inc. is announcing a partnership with another major vendor hoping to secure a seat at the software-defined table. EMC Corp. sees the same promise in the startup’s technology as Redmond.

The Mesosphere Data Center Operating System, or DCOS, unifies the disparate components of an organization’s environment into a centralized resource pool that an application can draw upon as needed. That model is more efficient than the traditional approach of deploying workloads across multiple virtual machines that each need to be manually resized when requirements change.

The catch is that adopters need to specifically design their applications around the platform’s unique provisioning scheme, which introduces a great deal of additional complexity into the development process. One of the main pain points stems from the fact that DCOS is meant to run on commodity hardware that lacks the advanced capabilities of pricier proprietary alternatives, which requires building the functionality directly into the workload.

That has the side effect of rendering those proprietary alternatives more or less obsolete, which, as the industry’s leading proprietary storage vendor, EMC has a vested interest in addressing. Given the traction that DCOS starting to gaining, now is as good of a time as any to try and make that happen.

The first fruits of its alliance with Mesosphere are two open-source tools designed to provide better integration between the platform and its ScaleIO software-defined storage stack. The company’s reasoning is that organizations adopting DCOS will be more likely to choose its products over cheaper commodity alternatives it means reducing the work for their developers.

Both dvdcli and mesos-module-dvdi target deployments that employ Docker, the prefered application deployment format on DCOS, and take advantage of the existing support for the containerization engine in ScaleIO to provide interoperability with the platform. EMC plans on expanding that integration later down the line with capabilities for automating the consumption of ScaleIO-managed storage resources in various use cases.

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