Pure Storage is buying Portworx, the container storage software startup, for $370m in cash.
Update. Pure Storage says it is buying Portworx. 16 September 2020.
By acquiring Portworx, Pure is obtaining one of the leading container storage storage suppliers and improve its ability to supply storage to enterprises who have adopted Kubernetes. It says it will be able to provide Kubernetes data services that run on any cloud, any storage, and any infrastructure.
Pure’s chairman and CEO Charles Giancarlo issued a quote: “We are thrilled to have the Portworx team and their groundbreaking technology joining us at Pure to expand our success in delivering multi-cloud data services for Kubernetes.” It is Pure’s largest acquisition to date.
Murli Thirumale, Portworx CEO and co-founder, said: “The traction and growth we see in our business daily shows that containers and Kubernetes are fundamental to the next-generation application architecture and thus competitiveness. We are excited for the accelerated growth and customer impact we will be able to achieve as a part of Pure.”
Last month Blocks and Files asked Pure international CTO Alex McMullan about the company’s intentions towards Portworx. “We’re always looking to explore ways of growing our business,” he replied, “but right now I can’t confirm anything specific.”
Portworx supplies container storage software, which includes backup and restore features. The company was founded in 2015 by Murli Thirumale and CTO Gou Rao, who previously set up deduplication startup Ocarina and sold it to Dell in 2010.
To date, Portworx has bagged $55.5m in three funding rounds, including $27m last year. There are around 100 employees. Sales grew 500 per cent from an undisclosed number in 2016 to 2017 and 100 per cent from 2018 to 2019. The company claims its Q2 2020 performance was a record.
All-flash array vendor Pure supplies on-premises FlashArray block, FlashBlade for file and object storage, and has a Cloud Block Store offering for public clouds. Pure has supported container storage since 2018 with the Pure Storage Orchestrator (PSO). This receives storage provisioning requests and responds in real time, setting up paths between containers and the back-end Pure arrays.
Pure says that, by combining Portworx container data services with Pure’s data platforms and PSO software, Pure will provide a comprehensive suite of data services that can be deployed in-cloud, on bare metal, or on enterprise arrays, all natively orchestrated in Kubernetes.
In April, Pure teamed up with Kasten to integrate its storage arrays with Kasten’s containerised app backup.
