Portworx rolls out container storage update, boasts of sales momentum

Portworx, the container storage startup, has updated its software with more automation, backup and restore features, and performance improvements.

Portworx CTO and cofounder Gou Rao said in the launch announcement yesterday: “Enterprises fuelling their data transformation initiatives with Kubernetes cannot rely on traditional storage that fails to keep up with the scale and dynamism of Kubernetes environments, or cloud-native solutions that have yet to be proven at a global scale.”

Florian Buchmeier, DevOps engineer at Audi Business Innovation, provided a canned quote: “Portworx provides an enterprise-class alternative to the network-attached storage commonly available on the cloud but at one third the price and substantially higher performance.”

Portworx update

Portworx Enterprise 2.6 provides:

  • Node capacity rebalancing to avoid any one node getting over-burdened.
  • Portworx storage cluster continues to operate during temporary etcd outages – etcd is a key value store used as Kubernetes’ backing store for all cluster data.
  • Support for k3S Kubernetes edge application distribution with hundreds and thousands of endpoints.
  • Kubernetes application pods can now access proxy volumes – external data sources (e.g. NFS shares) from Portworx Volumes.

Portworx PX-Backup 1.1 adds the ability to selectively restore individual resource types from a backup instead of the entire application. It supports custom or generic Customer Resources Definitions, through which users add their own objects to the Kubernetes cluster and use them like native Kubernetes objects.

Application CPU, memory and storage qotas can be applied at the namespace level, ensuring restored applications are placed on clusters with sufficient resources. V1.1 enables admins to create policies to backup Kubernetes cluster namespaces or applications using wildcards for namespaces that get created later. Admins also get more metrics like number of protected namespaces, size of backups and alert status for backups and restores.

PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management 1.3 adds GKE pool management support, auto pool rebalance, and GitOps-based approval workflow. These help admins reduce cloud storage spend.

Portworx has also been certified for use with the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP).

Portworx Enterprise 2.6 will be generally available on August 24. PX-Autopilot 1.3 will be generally available on August 31. PX-Backup 1.1 is available in Tech Preview from today.

Money talk

Portworx claims revenues in its second 2020 quarter were a record, without specifying numbers, and followed on from its previous record-setting first quarter.

The company said it is winning some big-ticket orders, without specifying names. One customer is running Portworx software in a production environment with more than 1,500 nodes and 90 Kubernetes clusters. The company thinks this is unmatched in the industry.

Twenty-six customers have bought $250,000 or more worth of licenses. It completed a $1m-plus license sale in Q2 and two customers have bought $300,000-plus purchases to add backup and restore, disaster recovery, and Kubernetes-granular storage to their OpenShift environment. If Red Hat Open Shift customers are adding Portworx to their deployments a partnership would perhaps benefit both companies.