Portworx nabs $27m investment, updates container storage platform

Portworx, which specialises in storage for container deployments, has secured an extra $27m from investors as it seeks to expand into new global markets. The firm has also updated its flagship Portworx Enterprise platform with a focus on security and disaster recovery.

Founded four years ago by former executives from Ocarina Networks, Portworx is one of a number of startups that have sprung up to address the need for an effective storage and data management layer for the container platforms that are all the rage in developer circles.

Portworx must be doing something right, as it claims to have experienced a 400 per cent year on year increase in bookings, and has raised $27m in Series C funding to help fund expansion. The firm said this latest funding round was led by Sapphire Ventures and Mubadala Investment Company, with support from existing investors Mayfield Fund and GE Ventures. Perhaps significantly, new financing also came from Cisco, HPE, and NetApp.

The investment follows closely on the release of Portworx Enterprise 2.1, which brings new features focused on security and disaster recovery. This includes new role-based access controls as part of the platform’s PX-Security layer, plus a new PX-DR data recovery layer. This enables disaster recovery with zero data loss between data centees located in a single metropolitan area, Portworx claims.

Both are designed to address shortcomings in the ubiquitous Kubernetes container orchestrator. Kubernetes does not currently support authorisation and access control using standard enterprise systems like Active Directory or LDAP, and so PX-Security now enables this, offering role-based authentication, authorisation, and ownership on a per container data volume basis.

Likewise, PX-DR is touted by Portworx as the first step towards Kubernetes-native disaster recovery. It offers three levels of HA and Data Protection for mission critical apps: within a single data centre or multi-availability zones; across data centres or clouds within a metropolitan area; and across data centres spanning the world.

The new features will be available in Portworx Enterprise 2.1 from March 31.