DEVOPSdigest

Portworx announced an update to Portworx Enterprise, its container-native storage platform, to enable companies to run, scale, backup, and recover mission-critical applications on Kubernetes: PX-Backup and PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management.

With PX-Backup, Portworx is entering the enterprise backup market to enable organizations to easily and securely manage all of their Kubernetes backups in a cloud-native way. PX-Backup is unique to the container industry by supporting the backup of individual Pods, groups of Pods, or an entire Kubernetes namespace through a single command, even if the enterprise is using Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google storage to manage their container volumes, and not Portworx Enterprise.

Additionally, PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management enables enterprises to cut their cloud storage costs in half by intelligently provisioning storage only when it is needed, eliminating the longstanding problem of paying for cloud storage when it is provisioned, not when it is consumed.

“Digital transformation in the enterprise is increasingly driven by technologies like containers and Kubernetes. Together, these technologies help teams quickly deliver better services to their users and customers,” said Gou Rao, CTO, Portworx. “With these new capabilities, we are making good on our mission to provide full-stack support for running data-rich applications on Kubernetes so enterprises can reach their business transformation goals, all with cost-savings and compliance in mind.”

PX-Backup: Earlier this year, Portworx released PX-DR, a disaster recovery solution custom-built for Kubernetes applications. While not every application requires advanced DR, according to 451 Research, 53% of companies have application recovery point objectives (RPO) of less than 24 hours even for non-critical apps and data – demonstrating the criticality of backups for all enterprise applications. To solve this, Portworx is releasing PX-Backup, a point-and-click backup and recovery solution for Kubernetes applications. By extending Portworx Enterprise with the PX-Backup add-on, enterprises can manage, secure, protect, and backup any data-rich application running on Kubernetes.

PX-Backup captures application data, configuration, and Kubernetes objects as a single unit and enables enterprises to place this critical data into any S3-compatible object storage. Once backed up, Kubernetes applications can be easily recovered and redeployed by relaunching a standard Kubernetes deployment file. Additionally, PX-Backup captures meta-data about backups, allowing enterprises to answer important questions like who, what, when, where, and for how long, important for compliance and governance use cases for backups.

Additional capabilities include:

- For the first time, enterprises that are not yet using Portworx Enterprise for container storage can use this backup solution for Kubernetes apps backed by cloud storage solutions like Microsoft Azure Managed Disks, Amazon Web Services EBS and Google Persistent Disks, marking Portworx’s foray into the important enterprise backup market.

- Backups can even be taken of multi-node distributed databases like Cassandra, Kafka, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB – something most other backup solutions cannot achieve for distributed databases without risking data corruption.

- Backups can be sent to any S3-compatible object storage, enabling backups to be stored and recovered in a single cloud or data center, or across multiple clouds and data centers.

PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management: While Kubernetes automates the deployment of applications, enterprises must also be able to automate their underlying infrastructure to ensure they have sufficient compute and storage available to scale applications. Even though enterprises were promised a pay-for-use model in the cloud, the reality is that they manage the difficulty of scaling storage capacity for data services running on Kubernetes by overprovisioning block storage, often by 2-3x. This means they pay for storage even though it goes unused. PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management allows the enterprise to cut their storage bills in half by automatically detecting when storage capacity is running low and provisioning more only when it’s needed. PX-Autopilot can scale the storage for an individual container volume or the entire storage pool, with rules customized by the user. Without PX-Autopilot, the multi-step process to provision and scale additional storage can take up to 20 hours of a platform administrator’s time in the types of enterprise environments Portworx customers use.

PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management is available for purchase today as an add-on for Portworx Enterprise 2.3, while PX-Backup is available in Tech Preview.