Pure Storage pumps up Portworx

Pure Storage has announced a trifecta of Portworx upgrades for containerized app developers: a data access speed bump, new object storage and faster disaster recovery, and a fully managed service offering. There’s also a free version of Portworx Backup.

Portworx, acquired by Pure in 2020, is a container storage and backup software business in the process of being developed into a general Kubernetes operations facility. A Portworx Data Service supports different databases and includes a Kubernetes Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). There is a Portworx Enterprise Kubernetes data management product, and a Portworx Backup-as-a-Service on AWS.

Murli Thirumale, VP & GM of Pure’s Cloud Native Business Unit, said: “By delivering the fully managed service for the Portworx platform, the #1 Kubernetes data platform, we are bringing the cloud experience, on any storage infrastructure, to the fingertips of any developer who wants to work with Kubernetes apps in production.”

Portworx Enterprise 3.0 

This latest version has a PX-Fast feature providing higher performance for low latency data services such as Kafka, Elastic, and MongoDB. These services can have fast ingestion and high throughput needs for online transaction processing (OLTP), online analytical processing (OLAP), and machine learning (ML) workloads.

The Portworx Kubernetes Data Management platform promises throughput and IOPS almost as fast as writing directly to NVMe SSDs, with a claimed 1 million-plus IOPS rating. Pure says PX-Fast makes Kubernetes data storage look like local storage for containerized apps and data.

The Portworx product supports disaster recovery (DR) capabilities with zero RPO and fast RTO between two metro region clusters with circa 10ms latency. Portworx disaster recovery is improved with a Near-Sync DR capability providing a claimed 24-second RPO and a fast RTO between two cloud regions or geographically distant datacenters with higher network latencies.

Portworx already supports file and block storage access. Version 3 adds S3 access, so that users can manage and access object storage buckets with native Kubernetes integration and a single consistent experience across cloud and on-premises S3 stores.

The easy button and a free offering

Users of Amazon EKS, RedHat OpenShift, and any other Kubernetes services (fully managed or upstream distributions) can consume all of the Portworx products as a fully managed service. Pure says it delivers a no install, easy to use, and easy to manage experience to users with no container expertise required. They get, Pure claims, ease of use and faster deployment of Kubernetes data on any cloud or on-premises storage, enabling DevOps and platform teams to operate and scale containerized apps into production in seconds, versus weeks or months.

Pure is also introducing a free fully managed service tier of Portworx Backup. Users get no feature restrictions, and can protect up to 1TB of data at no cost and for an indefinite period. Each backup instance can manage hundreds of Kubernetes clusters.

Portworx Enterprise v3.0 and the fully managed service will be available in early 2023.