From Portworx, PX-Enterprise With Multi-Cloud Backup and Security Features

Portworx, Inc. announced the latest release of its PX-Enterprise solution.

The purpose-built, persistent storage solution for containers is trusted by global enterprises such as GE, Lufthansa and TGen, as well as by Fortune 500 names in banking and entertainment.

PX-Enterprise 1.2 comes at a time when container adoption is accelerating. However, persistent storage remains the number one barrier to adoption, and enterprises are concerned about data loss, according to a survey of 491 IT pros recently conducted by the company.

This version of PX-Enterprise adds five frequently requested features
that enable cloud-native data lifecycle management for containerized apps:

• Cloud Snap is the container’s first multi-cloud backup solution designed for cloud-native applications.

• PX-Enterprise offers bring-your-own-key (BYOK) encryption for container data at rest. Together with Portworx’s existing data-in-flight encryption, PX-Enterprise provides complete encryption for customers’ mission-critical data at the container level.

• PX-Enterprise’s integration into Amazon Web Services‘ popular Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) feature enables Ops automation for stateful services running on the most popular cloud platform.

• PX-Enterprise supports Prometheus integration to enable, real-time monitoring and alerts for customers managing mission-critical, cloud-native infrastructure.

• PX-Enterprise now ships as a Docker v2 plug-in to deliver higher levels of reliability and availability to enterprise workloads running in Docker containers.

Cloud Snap
With the addition of Cloud Snap, users can regularly backup their stateful containers – such as Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Redis and Jenkins – to the cloud or to on-premises object storage of their choice in a cost-effective, high-performance manner. When integrated with popular container schedulers – including Kubernetes, Mesos and Swarm – Cloud Snap provides DevOps-friendly, cloud-native, multi-site backup. With Cloud Snap’s efficient data-transfer mechanism, users can create a cross data-center, multi-site backup system, thus ensuring that if a customer suffers a catastrophic outage in one data center, it can keep its app running in another.

Cloud Snap works by allowing PX-Enterprise users to programmatically or manually snapshot the persistent volumes underlying their stateful services and send them to their object store of choice, including Amazon S3, Azure Blog and Google Cloud Storage. It improves backup performance while simultaneously reducing bandwidth and storage costs by transferring the entire dataset the first time it is sent to an object store. For subsequent snapshots – which often occur hourly or nightly – only the differences from the previous snapshot are sent.

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BYOK Encryption
The latest release of PX-Enterprise includes AES-256 BYOK encryption for data in flight and at rest, providing complete encryption for customers’ mission-critical data at the container-volume level. This feature improves security while allowing customers to maintain control of their data. As containers continue to gain traction as the go-to solution for running enterprise workloads, encrypting container data has become an increasingly important requirement. With BYOK encryption, PX-Enterprise supports encrypting data at container-granularity level. Every company’s container volume can be encrypted with a key that only the customer possesses. Portworx provides encryption at rest by integrating with the key management systems AWS KMS, Hashicorp Vault and Docker Secrets.

AWS ASG Integration
The integration with AWS ASG allows Amazon users to take advantage of Amazon’s ability to dynamically expand and contract application clusters for their containerized applications. Until now, container users have had to do this manually, defeating the value of auto scaling. Using PX-Enterprise, users can rely on AWS Auto-Scaling Groups to scale out the number of compute nodes based on demand, access firm’s container volumes, dynamically scale down the number of nodes, and never lose data. PX-Enterprise automatically creates and manages the EBS volumes and their attachments to EC2 VMs. At the same time, it continues to provide container-granular volumes to containers running in ASG nodes. Compute and storage can be independently scaled for even the most dynamic of workloads, such as building in CI/CD pipelines and analyzing data in best-of-breed suites like Elastic Search.

“Because our customers trust us with their mission-critical data, we know that data protection is paramount,” said Murli Thirumale, co-founder and CEO, Portworx. “With these new technical advances in multi-cloud backup and encryption, Portworx responds to the needs of modern DevOps teams for speed and agility without sacrificing reliability and security. The ability to solve the No. 1 barrier to container adoption – persistent storage – in a way that works for the most sophisticated customers on the planet is why we are the leader in container data services.“

This version of PX-Enterprise is available.