Portworx: PX-Enterprise 1.6 With OpenStorage SDK

Portworx, Inc. announced PX-Enterprise 1.6, which includes a software development kit (SDK) to automate cloud-native storage and data management.

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With this update, DevOps and ITOps engineers can use a set of APIs to programmatically manage operations of containerized databases and other stateful services across multiple clouds, based on business requirements.

These capabilities enable the company’s growing customer base-including 24 members of the Fortune Global 2000 and government agencies – to automatically scale and respond to inevitable hardware, software, and network failures that accompany large-scale distributed applications.

By automating operations that in the past would have required manual intervention of specialized operations teams, PX-Enterprise reduces operations costs, improves customer experiences and allows Ops teams to more easily react to changing business needs.

“Today’s enterprises rely on innovative technologies like containers and Kubernetes to automatically manage mission-critical applications in production, but traditional enterprise storage doesn’t give our customers the agility they need to support these highly-dynamic, complex cloud native environments,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO and cofounder, Portworx. “In order to quickly and securely ship and run applications at scale, enterprise IT teams need a flexible cloud native storage and data management solution that enables them to programmatically manage HA, backup and recovery, multi-cloud operations, encryption and more based on their unique business needs. With PX-Enterprise 1.6, we’re arming our customers with a complete data management solution that’s as easy to program as the rest of their infrastructure.“

PX-Enterprise introduces two new capabilities to provide a fully-programmable infrastructure, including an open source OpenStorage SDK and automated storage provisioning for vSphere and Pivotal Container Service for Kubernetes (PKS). These updates give DevOps teams control over how storage resources are managed and allocated and allow data management workflows to be automated, which leads to increased operational efficiency with fewer errors and data security breaches, and a simpler user experience.

“Operational firefighting kills innovation because you are always focused on yesterday’s problem instead of looking towards the future,” said Sunil Pentapati, director, platform operations, Fractal Industries, Inc. “The way to avoid constant firefighting is automation, which leads to more resilient, more secure, and more flexible applications. This is especially important for industries like cybersecurity and financial services where real-time data management is critical. Manual operations and real-time don’t mix. With the new PX-Enterprise SDK, we have the ability to control every aspect of our cloud native storage via APIs to fully automate data management in real time.“

OpenStorage SDK
PX-Enterprise 1.6 includes a brand open source OpenStorage SDK that allows engineers to use native calls over gRPC in languages like Golang, Python, and many others, or use simple RESTful APIs, to automatically determine how storage is allocated, consumed, encrypted, backed-up and managed across multiple clouds, including defining I/O levels, creating snapshots, and migrating and managing data based on their unique business needs.

OpenStorage is the open-source control plane used by PX-Enterprise, which a recent CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) survey showed to be a popular cloud native block storage solution used in production.

Automatic storage provisioning for vSphere and PKS
PX-Enterprise 1.6 also adds automatic storage provisioning for vSphere and PKS private clouds. This allows vSphere users to decouple compute from storage and scale compute without worrying about data availability or migration. Any stateful application running on PKS cluster can now be scaled up and down seamlessly when backed by Portworx volumes.

PX-Enterprise 1.6 is available and includes the OpenStorage SDK.

Ressources:
Infrastructure-as-code for the data management using the OpenStorage SDK and Python
Architect’s Corner: Fractal Industries leverages automation to run stateful services in containers at massive scale
Companies use Portworx
Kubernetes Storage