Portworx Enterprise 2.2 to Address Challenges for Enterprise Container Adoption

Portworx, Inc. announced Portworx Enterprise 2.2, an update to its cloud-native storage and data management platform with features focused on security, data protection, and DR.

With this update, Portworx Enterprise provides a one-command backup and recovery experience for complex applications running on Kubernetes, giving enterprises more control over their mission-critical data. With these capabilities, the company is expanding the number of enterprise applications that can run on Kubernetes by solving hard, non-negotiable business requirements like data security and DR for the firm’s large and growing global customer base, including GE Digital, Lufthansa Systems, HPE and dozens of members of the Fortune Global 2000.

According to the company and Aqua Security‘s 2019 Annual Container Adoption Survey (registration required), 87% of respondents report running container technologies – an increase from 55% in 2017 – with 9 in 10 of these enterprises running them in production. However, security, data management, and multi-cloud operations remain leading barriers to enterprise container adoption, with 40% of respondents citing data management, and 36% citing multi-cloud and cross-data center management among their top three concerns. Additionally, when asked to name their top 3 storage challenges, respondents most frequently cited data security (56%), concerns about data loss (46%), and planning for DR and BC (40%).

The Enterprise v2.2 solution addresses these challenges to give enterprises more control over their mission critical data by making essential capabilities like DR, BC, backups, restores and migrations of containerized apps faster and easier, all while maintaining data security.

“Digital transformation in the enterprise is being increasingly driven by technologies like containers and Kubernetes, which together enable teams to build better software faster, and to unleash radical innovation. But Kubernetes alone was not designed to handle the mission critical data services at the heart of enterprise applications. Unless Kubernetes can be augmented to satisfy non-negotiable business requirements like data security, data protection, backup and recovery, SLA management and compliance, digital transformation driven by Kubernetes will be incomplete,” said Eric Han, VP, product management, Portworx. “We’re releasing Portworx Enterprise 2.2 to help enterprises solve the toughest challenges for running containerized stateful applications on Kubernetes, allowing them to transform their business and get the most from their container investments.“

Dashboard Cluster
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Kubernetes application backups in single command
Enterprises running mission-critical data-rich applications in Kubernetes are required to backup application data and the Kubernetes objects that define application configuration. Traditional enterprise backup solutions only focus on data, making recovering applications time-consuming and risky. Alternatively, container-focused backup solutions only backup Kubernetes objects, requiring customers to solve backup themselves. With the solution Enterprise V2.2, enterprises for can backup entire Kubernetes applications to any S3-compatible object store, including data and Kubernetes objects, with a single command. All data is backed up in its encrypted state using a key that only the customer controls, ensuring that bad actors never see the unencrypted data.

Restore complex applications in single command
In the same way Portworx Enterprise backups application data and application configuration, enterprises can restore a Kubernetes application with a single command. Restores are not limited to single containers: complex applications made up of multiple containers can be restored using Enterprise Group Snapshots, which create an application-consistent copy of distributed applications. As with backup data security, restored data can only be decrypted with the customer’s key, ensuring security for the entire backup and recovery workflow.

Kubernetes application migration

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Extending its enterprise’s ability to migrate application data and Kubernetes pod configurations between clusters, enterprises can now move applications to different namespaces within the same Kubernetes cluster, providing more control over where and how they run their applications.

In addition to the above capabilities, the Enterprise 2.2 provides application caching and CRI-O support. Portworx Application Caching provides a built-in data caching layer to speed up reads and writes, improving application performance, and support for CRI-O enables the Open Container Initiative-based implementation of Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface used on OpenShift 4.

Portworx Enterprise 2.2 will be available on June 22, 2019.

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