Portworx Into Enterprise Backup Market With Kubernetes Backup Solution

Portworx, Inc. announced an update to Portworx Enterprise, its container-native storage platform, to enable companies to run, scale, backup, and recover mission-critical applications on Kubernetes: PX-Backup and PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management.

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With PX-Backup, the company is entering the enterprise backup market to enable organizations to securely manage all of their Kubernetes backups in a cloud-native way. It is unique to the container industry by supporting the backup of individual Pods, groups of Pods, or an entire Kubernetes namespace through a single command, even if the enterprise is using Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google storage to manage their container volumes and not Portworx Enterprise.

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Additionally, PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management enables enterprises to cut their cloud storage costs in half by intelligently provisioning storage only when it is needed, eliminating the longstanding problem of paying for cloud storage when it is provisioned, not when it is consumed.

Container adoption is rapidly increasing as enterprises recognize the power of cloud native technologies to accelerate their digital transformation. Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 20% of enterprise primary storage capacity will be deployed to support container workloads, up from less than 1% today. As such, today’s enterprises need a container-native storage platform that addresses all of the challenges they face when running containerized applications on Kubernetes. This update cements the firm’s as the only container-native storage and data management platform that provides fast, scalable container storage, automated capacity management, backup and recovery, DR, multi-cloud migration, and data security for containerized applications running on Kubernetes.

“Digital transformation in the enterprise is increasingly driven by technologies like containers and Kubernetes. Together, these technologies help teams quickly deliver better services to their users and customers,” said Gou Rao, CTO, Portworx. “With these new capabilities, we are making good on our mission to provide full-stack support for running data-rich applications on Kubernetes so enterprises can reach their business transformation goals, all with cost-savings and compliance in mind.“

PX-Backup
Earlier this year, the firm released PX-DR, a DR solution custom-built for Kubernetes applications. While not every application requires advanced DR, according to 451 Research, 53% of companies have application RPO of less than 24 hours even for non-critical apps and data – demonstrating the criticality of backups for all enterprise applications. To solve this, the company is releasing PX-Backup, a point-and-click backup and recovery solution for Kubernetes applications. By extending Portworx Enterprise with the PX-Backup add-on, enterprises can manage, secure, protect, and backup any data-rich application running on Kubernetes.

PX-Backup captures application data, configuration, and Kubernetes objects as a single unit and enables enterprises to place this data into any S3-compatible object storage. Once backed up, Kubernetes applications can be recovered and redeployed by relaunching a standard Kubernetes deployment file. Additionally, it captures metadata about backups, allowing enterprises to answer important questions like who, what, when, where, and for how long, important for compliance and governance use cases for backups.

Additional capabilities include:

Enterprises who are not yet using Portworx Enterprise for container storage can use this backup solution for Kubernetes apps backed by cloud storage solutions like Microsoft Azure Managed Disks, Amazon Web Services EBS and Google Persistent Disks, marking the firm’s foray into the enterprise backup market.
Backups can be taken of multi-node distributed databases like Cassandra, Kafka, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB – something most other backup solutions cannot achieve for distributed databases without risking data corruption.
Backups can be sent to any S3-compatible object storage, enabling backups to be stored and recovered in a single cloud or data center, or across multiple clouds and data centers.

PX-Autopilot for capacity management
While Kubernetes automates the deployment of applications, enterprises must also be able to automate their underlying infrastructure to ensure they have sufficient compute and storage available to scale applications. Even though enterprises were promised a pay-for-use model in the cloud, the reality is that they manage the difficulty of scaling storage capacity for data services running on Kubernetes by overprovisioning block storage, often by 2-3x. This means they pay for storage even though it goes unused. PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management allows enterprise to cut their storage bills in half by automatically detecting when storage capacity is running low and provisioning more only when it’s needed. It can scale the storage for an individual container volume or the entire storage pool, with rules customized by the user. Without PX-Autopilot, the multi-step process to provision and scale additional storage can take up to 24 hours of a platform administrator’s time in the types of enterprise environments customers use.

PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management is available for purchase as an add-on for Portworx Enterprise 2.3, while PX-Backup is available in Tech Preview.

“As Microsoft enables more and more mission critical applications to run on Kubernetes on Azure, it is important for our customers to have a Kubernetes-native backup solution,” said Aung Oo, head, product, Azure Disks, Microsoft Corp. “We are excited that PX-Backup enables Microsoft Azure customers to easily backup and recover their containerized applications using Azure solutions such as Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Managed Disks and Block Blob storage.“

“With this announcement, Portworx is expanding Portworx Enterprise with capabilities that are unique for this kind of container storage solution and in high demand from organizations where Kubernetes is business-critical,” said Enrico Signoretti, senior storage analyst, Gigaom. “By consolidating data protection and automation functionalities in the storage layer, Portworx enables its customers to simplify operations while helping them to focus more on data than simple storage management.“

“Lightweight containers are proving to be an increasingly viable approach for many forms of business critical-applications,” said Steven Hill, senior analyst, 451 Research. “Platforms like Portworx offer a coherent ecosystem for automating data management and protection of Kubernetes-based workloads, combining the flexibility of containers with enterprise BC and DR capabilities.“

Resource:
Kubernetes Storage

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