Portworx PX-Enterprise 1.4 With Cloud Native Storage for Kubernetes

Portworx, Inc. announced the availability of PX-Enterprise 1.4, a release to-date of its solution for running stateful containers in production.

Updates in 1.4 include 3DSnap, a snapshot solution for complex Kubernetes application, as well as a brand GUI for PX-Enterprise optimized for multi-cloud environments. These capabilities enable customers to store and protect containerized applications, including their mission critical data from a single platform, and were developed in collaboration with the company’s growing customer base, including 15 of the Fortune Global 1000.

“I chose Portworx as the cloud native storage layer for my multi-tenant container-as-a-service platform because it allows me to offer best-in-class featurs like HA, auto-scaling, backup and reovery, and encryption to my customers at a reasonable cost,” said Kris Watson, CEO, ComputeStacks, a company that provides a Docker container platform to service providers. “And now, PX-Enterprise with 3DSnap allows me to provide a time machine for my customer’s entire application, ensuring that I can always restore it to a particular point-in-time with guaranteed application consistency. No one else can do that.“

“As enterprises transition to the cloud and DevOps, they are accelerating their container initiatives and expanding them to include mission critical data services. Since our first release of PX-Enterprise, we are seeing orders of magnitude increases in both scale and complexity of applications being run in containers. Our customers now require a scalable cloud native storage platform that simplifies their IT infrastructure and operations, protects against cybersecurity threats and future-proofs their infrastructure for a multi-cloud world,” said Murli Thirumale, co-founder and CEO, Portworx. “With PX-Enterprise 1.4, we continue to lead with industry-first container data management, backup and security capabilities. Portworx allows enterprises to deploy agile, cost-effective containerized applications that quickly deliver innovative services to their customers at scale.“

PX-Enterprise adds seven features that enable cloud native storage
and management for containerized applications:

3DSnap: 3DSnap is an application backup and restore snapshotting capability that permits enterprises to group volumes together for backup. This enables backup and recovery for complex aplications through application consistent snapshots of Kubernetes stateful sets, directly from the Kubernetes command line.
PX-Enterprise user interface: An updated version of PX-Enterprise’s GUI provides a fast, responsive way to manage multi-cloud container clusters, including a timeline of snapshots for backup and recovery management.
Kubernetes Per Volume Secrets: Per Volume Secrets enable enterprises to encrypt individual Kubernetes volumes with different keys, a requirement for many multi-tenant environments.
DC/OS Vault support: PX-Enterprise 1.4 also adds support for Mesosphere DC/OS Vault so customers can store encryption keys in the Vault service built-in to DC/OS instead of spinning up a separate service.
Google Cloud auto scaling support for GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine): PX-Enterprise 1.4 enables automated management of Google Cloud disks by keeping track of which disks are attached to which GCP instance and automatically attaching them as the GKE cluster scales up.
CSI tech preview: PX-Enterprise 1.4 will have Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver as tech preview so customers can deploy their applications with Kubernetes 1.10 with volume provisioning through CSI. PX-Enterprise is the first cloud native storage software to support CSI natively.
License transfer functionality: With PX-Enterprise 1.4, customers can transfer a cluster license from one cluster to another cluster of the same size and capability so they can safely decommission an older cluster and migrate the workloads to a newer cluster.

3DSnap
3DSnap enable enterprises to group and snapshot their persistent data volumes as a single unit, in order to maintain an application-consistent backup of complex applications or a copy of complex data that can be used in end-to-end testing. This feature is useful in the case of scale-out databases that often have multiple data volumes for a single database. Likewise, applications such as WordPress require group snapshots since to restore a website to a particular point in time, files in a volume need to be snapshotted at the same time as a MySQL database. 3DSnap gets it name from the three dimensions represented by the snapshot: time, space (a particular server), and application. 3DSnap is initially available for MySQL and PostgreSQL, with other databases coming soon.

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PX-Enterprise user interface
It has been redesigned to include sleek, user-friendly design and fast response times even for large container deployments. Now a customer can view and manage their PX-Enterprise clusters from desktop, smartphone or tablet, including a bird’s-eye view of all of their clusters. Other features designed for power users include a cloud topology-aware node map showing which servers are in which data center, search capabilities, a time-machine like view of local snapshots and CloudSnap snapshots, and volume configuration management.

Kubernetes Per Volume Secrets
Previously, PX-Enterprise allowed all volumes created from a StorageClass to be encrypted with the same key. In many cases, however, a customer may want to take advantage of the automation provided by a StorageClass, but encrypt the volumes with different keys. This is useful in multi-tenant environments where each application gets the same type of storage, but different customers use that storage. With PX-Enterprise 1.4, all volumes can be encrypted with their own key, ensuring that data in one volume cannot be decrypted using the key of another volume.

PX-Enterprise 1.4 is available in preview and will be available on May 14.

Resources:
Blog: PX-Enterprise 1.4 brings application consistent snapshots to Kubernetes
Leading Companies use Portworx
Kubernetes Storage
Gartner Names Portworx Cool Vendor in Storage Technologies