CloudCasa this month claimed that open source Velero backup was far more prevalent in the Kubernetes data protection market than Portworx, Trilio or Kasten by Veeam. We note that many of these vendors do not make their figures publicly available but what do they say of CloudCasa’s claims?
CloudCasa supports Velero and COO Sathya Sankaran claimed Velero had a “two order of magnitude advantage over any commercial product that is out there today.” He based this on Velero’s 100 million-plus Docker pull stats and certain assumptions. Each user can make multiple pulls, but Sankaran said he assumes each make a mean of 100, which he claims “implies at least a million clusters are downloading.”
He presented an estimated user chart based on one percent of Velero downloads equating to 500,000 clusters deployed. We can’t vouch for its veracity as none of the other vendors were happy to make their numbers public.
Pure Storage and Portworx: The numbers are wrong
We asked a Pure Storage spokesperson about Portworx’s view of the Kubernetes app backup market and whether Pure agreed with the chart’s projection of its user base.
He said: “The Kubernetes app data protection market is growing at a fast CAGR year on year and Portworx, with its offerings of Portworx Backup and Portworx DR, has the most comprehensive enterprise offerings in this space. We cover a wide swathe of use cases from multi-site, multi-cloud backup and recovery to zero RPO metro DR solutions. While we don’t publicly share customer base details, the projections of customer base shared in the chart via mail is off by several orders of magnitude for Portworx.
“We are seeing large enterprises adopt Portworx to protect mission-critical applications in production, at scale. Our customers are regularly deploying hundreds of Kubernetes clusters and 1000s of namespaces and protecting all of them via a single pane of glass with Portworx Backup. An example customer story is here.
“Portworx is squarely focused on enterprise customers adopting Kubernetes for their tier-1 to tier-N workloads. We also cater to the SMB market via our SaaS offerings.
“Velero’s Docker pull numbers, on the other hand, are not a reflection of their traction with actual enterprise customers or even the market. These pulls are mostly from individual developers doing limited testing of a few Kubernetes applications and second tier backup vendors pulling it down as part of their application builds.
“A consistent trend we see with enterprises is that once their developer teams have tested with Velero, they then look for enterprise class Kubernetes data protection offerings that can give them multi-cluster management, fine granular RBAC, enterprise scale, automated application protection, best in class performance, multi-cloud support and inbuilt application hooks. Portworx Backup excels at providing these capabilities to customers and is therefore seeing accelerated enterprise customer adoption.”
Mere wrapping and insignificance
“Offerings that are merely wrapped around Velero, like CloudCasa, have suffered from the same limitations of Velero, do not offer enterprise class data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery and therefore have negligible enterprise customer adoption.”
Will Pure’s Portworx adopt Velero? The spokesperson said: “While the engineering effort to support Velero in our offerings is insignificant, the customer value through such an integration is even more insignificant.
“Velero is really a consumer-class tool, best utilized in limited non-production class use cases. A large majority of our customer base have had experience with Velero, as part of their early Kubernetes journey and understand very well that it is a limited tool best used in some non-production testing.
“Almost all of our install base graduated from their Velero usage to Portworx when considering moving tier-1 applications onto Kubernetes. Some of our large customers thoroughly tested Velero for their enterprise production requirements and gave overwhelming feedback on its limitations, which we captured in this blog. All of these large customers are now expanding their footprint on Portworx as we enable them to move more workloads to Kubernetes.”
Will Pure will offer a SaaS version of the Portworx K8s app data protection product?
It already does: “Portworx Backup is available as both a self managed offering and a SaaS offering. The Portworx Backup SaaS offering is a fully managed service that has been available for customers since June 2022. We also announced the industry’s most compelling Free Forever tier on Portworx Backup SaaS in October 2022 at Kubecon Detroit. Apart from the thousands of users who have signed up for Portworx Free Trial offers over the years, we have seen tremendous monthly traction in terms of user signups. More details on Portworx Backup SaaS are in this blog and a second one.”
Pure has announced SaaS-based offerings for all of the Portworx Platform, and launched the first Data Services on Kubernetes SaaS offering via its Portworx Data Services launch last year.
Trilio
David Safaii, Trilio’s executive chairman, told us: “Per the chart provided on ‘Estimated Users’, speaking for Trilio (only), the presented figures are incorrect. Though we will not share exact numbers we can comfortably say that Trilio’s customer base is well north of the number presented in your chart. As relates to users, Trilio’s offering spans departments in organizations creating 000’s of users. For example, there is an engagement at this moment that empowers IT, Network and Engineering Operational teams across an entire Telco with Trilio’s Intelligent Recovery capabilities.
“This has typically been the rule for us and not the exception as organizations look to our enterprise-class platform for scale, broad capabilities/features, support, and vision – which the upper end of the market is happy to pay for and rely on. Coupled with strong ties and deep collaboration with industry leading Distributions such as Red Hat, Trilio eliminates risk and instills confidence in Day 2 Operations.
“So, while there are 20,000 Velero users depicted in the chart, IMHO, it represents a number of individuals that have downloaded the tool. It does not present the story of organizations leveraging it to protect entire production environments. Yes, Docker is an excellent example of this.
“Please keep in mind the number of downloaded free tools by individuals in the wild that were never used or orphaned after they simply did not do what was required – maybe kicking the tires. While there is no way of tracking Velero usage in production states, the good news (about the download figure) is that it paints a story of a rapidly growing Kubernetes market. Developers and other individuals are all learning and building. Naturally, in the short term, they will want to leverage free when possible.
“Where do we go tomorrow with Velero? We will not comment on our product plans but Trilio will co-exist. There is no denying that Trilio’s technology will continue to lead from the front.”
Kasten by Veeam
A Veeam spokesperson told us regarding Kasten by Veeam and Velero: “Veeam has … nothing to add to the story.”
