Pure Storage: Portworx Enterprise 2.8 Expanded Platform for Storage

At Pure//Accelerate Digital, Pure Storage, Inc. announced the Portworx Enterprise 2.8.

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With integrations across the company’s portfolio of products and services and with VMware Tanzu, customers can use Portworx to scale their Kubernetes usage to greater levels with simplicity. With capabilities such as dynamic storage provisioning on FlashArray and FlashBlade, and unified visibility and support via Pure1, the company enables containerized workloads to run across the cloud, bare metal infrastructure, Pure Storage arrays, and also competitive storage solutions.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 40% of infrastructure and operations leaders will implement hybrid cloud storage architectures, up from 15% in 2021.⁽¹⁾ As customers adopt hybrid cloud strategies, they still need a consistent environment to run their modern applications. That means they need the same level of storage and data management capabilities, regardless of if they are in the cloud, or on-premises.

With Portworx Enterprise 2.8, customers get the same cloud-like experience for Kubernetes apps wherever they live, with broad Kubernetes ecosystem support.

Capabilities include:

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Delivers simple way to run Kubernetes applications at enterprises of scale and resiliency
The 2.8 release goes beyond the capabilities offered by other storage solutions who are limited to the ‘connector’ approach facilitated by the Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI), resulting in least common denominator features and limited scale.

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With a Kubernetes-native software approach built to support enterprises of scale and resiliency, the firm’s solution combines cloud-native storage management and data protection services with best-of-breed FlashArray and FlashBlade for deployment. Now when users provision container-native volumes through Portworx, storage volumes or file systems are automatically created on FlashArray and FlashBlade. This allows storage-as-code, as volumes and file systems can be provisioned using Kubernetes without the need to directly interface with the backing storage arrays. Container-native volumes receive the suite of Portworx container storage management features, including backup, DR, security, auto-scaling, and migration – features that aren’t tied to hardware and travel with the containerized application as it moves between on-prem and cloud deployments. With this integration, customers can manage their modern applications in a Kubernetes-native way, while taking advantage of the enterprise capabilities of their Pure arrays such as de-dupe and compression, achieving data reduction levels up to 10:1 depending on workload and a demonstrated 99.9999% reliability across 40,000+ arrays.

Predictive-capabilities of Pure1, now for Kubernetes apps
With this Portworx release, Kubernetes cluster and volume usage metrics collected by the company’s solution will be sent to Pure1, providing a unified observability stack and support experience for a customer’s Kubernetes applications with Portworx in the Pure1 portal, allowing customer to see their deployments end-to-end and troubleshoot issues with Kubernetes applications.

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Additionally, as Pure1 collects data necessary to understand deployment patterns, it enables customers to benefit from the predictive support capabilities of Pure1, powered by the Meta AI engine, which aims to detect anomalies and suggest resolution advice before issues become outages. With Portworx integrated with the global Pure support organization, this end-to-end data gives a trained support team the tools necessary to provide predictive support to all Portworx customers.

Protect Kubernetes applications and achieve fast recovery with Portworx and FlashBlade
PX-Backup was validated to work with FlashBlade – the company’s unified fast file and object platform – to provide performance backup and recovery of Kubernetes-based workloads. By combining PX-Backup with FlashBlade, customers can protect their entire Kubernetes applications, including data and configuration, and benefit from FlashBlade restore of up to 270TB/hour. Pure released a Reference Architecture for this solution, which will be the first of many validated solutions.

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Better container-native storage experience for VMware Tanzu as well as any CSI-compatible storage system:
The latest release extends company’s support for Kubernetes platforms with addition of VMware Tanzu (TKG) support via the native Tanzu CSI driver.

This means that customers can benefit from container-granular data management such as backup and recovery, encryption, and migration regardless of the storage backing their VMware environment including with vSAN, VVols, and VMFS datastores, or cloud block storage providers. Additionally, with Portworx Enterprise 2.8 supporting the latest CSI spec, the firm can provide a consistent, Kubernetes-native experience for applications running on any enterprise storage that supports CSI.

Unified experience for all Kubernetes apps running on Pure
With this release, FlashArray and FlashBlade customers can use Portworx Enterprise 2.8 to achieve performance, scale, automation, data protection, and data security for production applications running on Kubernetes. For customers starting their Kubernetes journey without all of these requirements, they can take advantage of a new offer starting this summer. The company’s first gen Kubernetes offering, Pure Service Orchestrator (PSO), will become a part of Portworx Essentials, Freemium offering, to provide customers with a unified storage orchestration offering for Kubernetes. The Portworx Essentials offering enables widespread use for customers using FlashArray and FlashBlade and is both included and supported in a customer’s Evergreen subscription or Pure as-a-Service subscription with more functionality than the current PSO. Additionally, customers can upgrade to Portworx Enterprise for additional security, data protection, and scale, while continuing to benefit from the deep integration with Pure. PSO will remain supported through the end of January 2022 at which point all customers will have to be transitioned to Portworx.

“Pure and Portworx together are redefining what storage for modern, cloud-native applications looks like. By delivering storage that can be orchestrated entirely through Kubernetes, Pure is delivering a seamless hybrid cloud experience and changing outcomes for customers.” said Murli Thirumale, VP and GM, cloud native business unit, Pure.