Pure Storage’s Portworx is looking to win over customers wishing to migrate their virtual machines to containers by adding VM support to its container storage software product.
Businesses and public sector customers can keep using existing VMs on Kubernetes while refactoring old apps or creating entirely new cloud-native ones using Kubernetes-orchestrated containers. VMware’s Tanzu offering added container support to vSphere. Pure is now taking the opposite approach by adding VM support to its Portworx offering. Pure positions this move in the broader context of Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware and the subsequent pricing changes that have affected VMware customers.
It says 81 percent of enterprises that participated in a 2024 survey of Kubernetes experts plan to migrate their VMware VMs to Kubernetes over the next five years, with almost two-thirds intending to do so within the next two years. v3.3 of the Portworx Enterprise software will add this VMware VM support and is projected to deliver 30 to 50 percent cost savings for customers moving VMs to containers.
Mitch Ashley, VP and Practice Lead, DevOps and Application Development at Futurum, stated: “With Portworx 3.3, Pure Storage is bringing together a scalable data management platform with a simplified workflow across containers and VMs. That’s appealing to enterprises modernizing their infrastructure, pursuing cloud-native applications, or both.”
v3.3 provides a single workflow for VM and cloud-native apps instead of having separate tools and processes. It will support VMs running on Kubernetes in collaboration with Red Hat, SUSE, Kubermatic, and Spectro Cloud, and deliver:
- RWX Block support for KubeVirt VMs running on FlashArray or other storage vendors’ products providing fast read/write capabilities
- Single management plane, including synchronized disaster recovery for VMs running on Kubernetes with no data loss (zero RPO)
- File-level backups for Linux VMs, allowing for more granular backup and restore
- Reference architecture and partner integrations with KubeVirt software from Red Hat, SUSE, Spectro Cloud, and Kubermatic
Portworx Enterprise 3.3 will be generally available by the end of May and you can learn more about it here.
