KubeCon North America: Portworx by Pure Storage Unveils PX-Backup 2.1 Application and Data Protection Platform

At KubeCon North America, Portworx by Pure Storage announced the release of PX-Backup 2.1, its application and data protection platform for modern applications.

Click to enlarge

The company also released survey data assessing end user perspectives on running stateful applications on Kubernetes.

The latest enhancements to PX-Backup provide enterprises with comprehensive data protection, multi-cloud mobility, and improved compliance support for applications running on Kubernetes, regardless of whether they are running on premises or in the cloud.

Enhancements include:

• Application portability between clouds: PX-Backup delivers application portability between any cloud or on-premises data center. With the latest version, customers can backup Kubernetes applications running in one cloud or data center and restore them in any other.

• Improved compliance via 3-2-1 backup rule support for any storage: The 3-2-1 backup rule is a standard for data protection plan, ensuring recovery from several failure scenarios. With this release, PX-Backup can now offload backups from CSI snapshots to object storage. Enterprises running Kubernetes apps on Portworx PX-Store, any CSI compliant storage service, or cloud-based storage can now use PX-Backup to maintain 3 copies of data (production, snapshots, backup copy) across both disk and object storage. This provides flexibility to store data offsite (in any cloud).

• Expanded recovery with support for file shares: In addition to existing capabilities to backup block-based workloads, enterprises can now backup and recover applications running on read-write-many (RWX) persistent volumes provisioned as file shares from FlashBlade, Portworx proxy volumes, or any NFS server.

• Improved protection using PX-Secure: PX-Backup users can now leverage both the role-based access controls and encryption services offered in Portworx PX-Secure, gaining an added layer of security support for their modern applications and the ability to reduce management overhead.

End user survey: Perspectives on running stateful applications on Kubernetes

Kubernetes continues to play a critical role in driving business agility and resilience as enterprises work to modernize their applications and infrastructure. An end user survey fielded among 500 IT professionals in the US and UK found that over half of respondents cited increasing agility (58%) and increasing resilience (52%) as the biggest drivers behind their team’s decision to build and deploy stateful applications on Kubernetes.

Key survey findings include:

• Impacts to a company’s bottom line: IT professionals agree that running stateful apps on Kubernetes allows them to develop (54%) and scale (55%) their apps faster, while allowing developers to be more efficient (55%).

• Backup and restore is a key requirement: Backup and restore (55%), data mobility and capacity management (49%), and HA (48%) were identified by IT professionals as the most critical requirements for stateful apps running on Kubernetes.

• Data mobility and protection are a challenge: Data mobility (29%) is the requirement IT professionals struggle to achieve the most when running stateful apps on Kubernetes, while Data Protection (46%) is the biggest operational challenge.

• Stateful workloads are expected to increase: A majority (87%) of respondents expect the percentage of stateful workloads over the next 12 months to increase, while 9% expect it to stay the same, and only 4% expect it to decrease.

Click to enlarge

“The latest survey findings underscore the urgency of securing mission-critical Kubernetes applications with a comprehensive data protection and compliance strategy. With the latest PX-Backup enhancements, we’re excited to offer global customers a vendor-agnostic solution to truly manage and secure their modern, yet distributed, Kubernetes infrastructure.” said Murli Thirumale, VP and GM, cloud native business unit.

PX-Backup 2.1 will be available in November 2021.

Resources:
Blog: Introducing PX-Backup 2.1
Survey: Running Stateful Applications on Kubernetes