Docker Inc. has acquired decentralized storage platform startup Infinit International Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

Founded in 2012, Infinit sells a decentralized storage platform that transforms commodity servers into multiple scalable, secure and fault-tolerant storage servers tailored for specific applications and more specifically is intended for container and micro-services deployments. The company’s software can be deployed on enterprise servers, virtual machines, containers, legacy appliances or commodity hardware or in the cloud, delivering what the company claims is a much-reduced total cost of ownership.

One of Infinit’s biggest selling points is its offer of truly decentralized peer-to-peer architecture versus more traditional master/slave models, which Infinit says protects it from single points of failure and bottlenecks. For Docker, the acquisition delivers what the company describes as “distributed storage that ‘just works’ out of the box, and can integrate [into] existing storage systems.”

“Application portability across any infrastructure has been a central driver for Docker usage,” Docker Founder and Chief Technology Officer Solomon Hykes said in a blog post. “As developers rapidly evolve from single-container applications to multi-container applications deployed on a distributed system, they want to make sure their entire application is portable across any type of infrastructure, whether on cloud or on premise. Infinit will address that by providing a portable distributed storage engine, in the same way that our SocketPlane acquisition provided a portable distributed overlay networking implementation for Docker.”

Hykes said the second driver is that enterprises expect their container platform to have a point of view about persistent storage while still having the flexibility of working with existing vendors. “There are numerous ways for Infinit to improve the Docker ecosystem, from a default volume plugin for stateful applications, to the distributed storage of images for the Docker Trusted Registry or to providing a hyper-converged storage environment in a Docker Swarm,” Infinit Chief Executive Officer Julien Quintard said in a separate blog post.

Coming into the acquisition, Infinit had raised $2.24 million over three rounds from investors including 360 Capital Partners, Alive Ideas and Alven Capital. The company claims it was close to raising a new round before agreeing to the Docker acquisition.

Image courtesy of Infinit