What Are Pure Storage Portworx and Kubernetes?

Enterprises rely on modern applications to remain competitive in increasingly crowded marketplaces. However, their traditional storage solutions often struggle to keep up, which results in businesses being held back.

Pure Storage's Portworx Enterprise aims to address this issue by providing data services that feature the availability, performance and security that modern apps require in a completely automated manner. This approach is ideal for organizations looking to take advantage of the increasingly Application Programming Interface (API)-driven multi-cloud and applications that run on solutions like Kubernetes.

What is Portworx Enterprise by Pure Storage?

Portworx Enterprise is a market-leading Kubernetes data service platform that enables you to run mission-critical applications in containers. The service was acquired by Pure Storage in September 2020, in a deal that became Pure's largest acquisition and enabled it to expand deeper into the multicloud data services market.

Portworx Enterprise also delivers modern virtualization by extending enterprise-grade storage and data management to both traditional virtualization and cloud-native workloads. Run VMs and containers on a single platform with built-in automation, high availability, and disaster recovery—maximizing existing infrastructure investments while enabling an open, scalable, and future-ready application platform.

The Pure Storage Portworx Enterprise solution enables any cloud-native data service to run on Kubernetes. This Pure Kubernetes solution provides you with fully integrated solutions for data protection and security, disaster recovery, cross-cloud and data migrations, persistent storage and capacity management for applications that run on Kubernetes.

What is Kubernetes storage?

Kubernetes is a free, open-source platform for container orchestration. It provides you with the management and services capabilities you need to deploy and scale container storage in any cloud or data center environment. 

Kubernetes storage enables your administrators to maintain various forms of persistent and non-persistent data in their Kubernetes clusters. This helps them create dynamic storage resources to serve their wide range of modern applications. A Kubernetes storage framework can also be used to help you provision the right storage option for multiple applications while requiring minimal administrative overhead.

Kubernetes applications are vastly different from traditional applications. They're formed of various elements (such as containers, configuration, pods and volumes), are deployed at much higher densities and are updated much more frequently. Therefore, it's not appropriate to try and manage or optimize these applications with traditional storage solutions. 

Benefits of Pure Storage's Portworx Enterprise

Portworx Enterprise storage offers a wide range of benefits for organizations looking to utilize Kubernetes for modern applications, including:

Complete data services: Portworx Enterprise storage is the only solution to offer a unified Kubernetes-native solution that addresses data protection, security and storage, as well as capacity management and migrations. 

Borderless cloud storage: Portworx Enterprise storage enables your business to run any application from any cloud environment or storage infrastructure. It also allows you to run those applications at all stages of the cloud-native lifecycle.

Accelerated digital transformation: Portworx Enterprise provides you with the industry's most complete data platform for automating, building, protecting and securing modern applications. This is crucial to ensuring you have all the tools you need to accelerate digital transformation efforts.

Unparalleled data protection: Portworx Enterprise provides unrivaled options for Kubernetes data protection. It offers high availability across all cloud availability zones and racks, point-and-click backup and restore options across Kubernetes applications and clusters, and up to zero recovery point objective (RPO) disaster recovery.

Subscription options: Portworx Enterprise enables you to take a subscription-based approach for managing modern applications. This subscription-based approach is ideal for cost-effectively running apps on Kubernetes in containers across hybrid cloud environments.

Storage for any infrastructure: Portworx Enterprise's 100 percent software approach makes it ideal for running on any infrastructure. For example, it can be run local disks within a Kubernetes node or on top of other Pure Storage hardware like FlashArray and FlashBlade to reap the full benefits of Kubernetes-native data management and storage.

Gold standard storage: Portworx Enterprise storage has been named as one of the leading Cloud-Native Kubernetes Storage solutions by GigaOm Research for the second consecutive year. GigaOm calls the solution "the gold standard" for enterprise cloud-native Kubernetes storage.

Portworx Enterprise subscription options

Pure Storage's Portworx Enterprise provides subscription options that provide cost-effective access to Kubernetes storage. Subscription options include: 

Portworx Enterprise: The Enterprise subscription level provides enhanced benefits and support. This includes access to any bare-metal or cloud Kubernetes cluster and cloud drive provisioning by offering access to more than 1,000 nodes per cluster with no limits on containers per node, volumes and storage per cluster. It also provides unlimited application-consistent snapshots and volume backups to the cloud. As an Enterprise customer, you get full access to community support and tutorials, as well as 24/7/365 enterprise support.

Portworx PX-backup: Portworx's PX-backup option enables you to capture entire applications and move them to a backup location with a single click of a button. It also allows you to quickly recover complete applications, such as application configuration, data and Kubernetes objects. PX-backup includes the provision of continuous backup between multiple global data centers and point-and-click recovery for all Kubernetes apps along with support for backup and recovery across cloud solutions like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This approach is vital to meeting compliance and governance requirements via a single pane of glass for all containerized applications.

Portworx Disaster Recovery: PX-Disaster Recovery makes providing data resiliency simple with automated and flexible disaster recovery (DR) that runs in any container environment. Flexible disaster recovery policies enables configurable recovery policies so you can set RPOs (Recovery Point Objective) and RTOs (Recovery Time Objective) that meet your business and compliance needs, reducing the risk of data loss or extended outages. 

• Synchronous DR enables users to meet zero RPO SLAs, providing virtually no data loss for mission-critical applications. Replicated clusters must be within the same metro region (latency of <10ms).
• Asynchronous DR provides flexibility for tier 2 or 3 applications that can tolerate more data loss or downtime. Set configurable replication schedules starting with a 15 minute RPO between clusters. 
• Simplified and centralized disaster recovery PX-Disaster Recovery simplifies protection of Kubernetes applications with automated disaster recovery and seamless failovers, enabling quick recovery with limited downtime. 

How WWT helps

Storage automation is a crucial tool in your mission to achieve your IT and business goals. Pure Storage's solutions, including Portworx Enterprise, are vital to bringing simplicity and speed to an area that can be complex and cost- and time-consuming. It helps you adopt the latest solutions for deploying modern applications and makes it easier to embrace automation.

WWT is committed to helping you modernize your cloud systems and infrastructures. Our partnership with Pure Storage enables you to embrace the latest storage solutions and achieve greater efficiency, lower the total cost of ownership and increase return on investment. Together, we help major organizations across industries like healthcare, manufacturing and media and entertainment run mission-critical workloads like artificial intelligence, data analytics and core virtualization. 

Discover how WWT can help your business reap the benefits of Pure Kubernetes and data storage by visiting our Advanced Technology Center.