Pure Storage Expands Kubernetes Data Platform to as-a-Service Offering

The data storage company Pure Storage is upgrading and expanding its Kubernetes data platform. 

Pure Storage released a fully managed as-a-service offering as part of its Portworx Enterprise 3.0 suite, according to the company last month. 

The managed service is intended to speed the timeline required for dev teams to push containerized applications into production. Pure Storage also believes the service will be easy to use for those who have little to no experience working with container technology. 

Portwork Enterprise 3.0 is designed to provide high data availability and scalability to DevOps teams that are running Kubernetes applications in production environments. All Portworx products are available as a managed service for users of Amazon EKS, Red Hat OpenShift, and other Kubernetes services. 

Failure rates are low for petabytes of data from applications like on-demand video and VoIP, according to Pure Storage. The unified storage platform supports file, block, and object storage.  

Pure Storage will also offer a free tier of Portworx Backup, which is a data protection and backup service for Kubernetes environments. 

Bringing cloud to developers

Portworx has always intended to give engineering teams a way to give developers an “enterprise-grade Kubernetes-ready data platform with speed, simplicity, and scale,” said Murli Thirumale, VP and GM of Pure Storage’s cloud native business unit. 

In offering a fully managed service, Pure Storage is “bringing the cloud experience, on any storage infrastructure, to the fingertips of any developer who wants to work with Kubernetes apps in production,” Thirumale said.

Kubernetes platform Red Hat OpenShift stands to benefit from Portworx’s combined platform, as do customers, said Chris Gray, VP of Red Hat’s North America partner ecosystem. 

“This latest managed cloud service offering from Portworx by Pure Storage addresses increased customer interest in building a single platform to offer storage, migration and data management-as-a-service to developers that works with Red Hat OpenShift, and demonstrates the power of an ecosystem of partners working together to better support our joint customers’ needs,” Gray said. 

Portworx Enterprise v3 features 

Portworx v3 added several new features: 

• Near-Sync DR: allows businesses to recover data at the lowest possible recovery point objective (RPO) from geographically distant data centers or separate cloud regions. 
• PX-Fast: optimizes the data path of operations like NVMe access, offering high throughput and effectively making Kubernetes storage seem like local storage because of the access speed. 
• Object Storage Service: integrated with Kubernetes, allowing developers to run containerized workloads through an object storage interface and manage their object storage buckets.  

Portworx in the market 

Notable Portworx technology partners include IBM, Red Hat, VMware, Microsoft, and Google. Customers include General Electric, Comcast, DreamWorks Animation, and Adobe. 

Two of GigaOM’s 2022 “Radar Reports” rank Pure Storage and Portworx as leaders in Kubernetes data storage. They were given the same honor in 2021 as well. 

The containerization market 

The global application container market was estimated to be valued at $3.3 billion in 2020 and is projected to increase to $9.7 billion by 2027, according to a report by Global Industry Analysts. The analysts project a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.2% during the period. 

Major competitors in the container market include Docker, VMware, Microsoft, Sysdig, and Twistlock. 

The as-a-service market

The global everything-as-a-service market was estimated to be valued at $474.9 billion in 2021 and is projected to increase to $2,631.1 billion in 2031, according to Allied Market Research. The projected CAGR is 18.9%. 

This market includes SaaS, DRaaS, and IaaS offerings, encompassing managed container services and others as well. 

Enterprises require large-scale technology to support their storage, compute, and networking infrastructure, but often the time and financial commitment aren’t doable for them when they need to implement this technology. Outsourcing it to experts and paying simply for the service rather than investing money and time into internal implementation is often an easier and valuable option. 

Read about enterprise container management trends next.