Portworx announced the latest edition of its namesake cloud-native storage and data management platform on March 20, providing users with new security and disaster recovery capabilities.
Portworx Enterprise 2.1 integrates a new feature the company has dubbed PX-Security, which provides granular role-based access controls that go beyond what are natively available in the open-source Kubernetes cloud-native container orchestration system. Data backup is being enhanced with the new PX-DR disaster recovery feature that provides low latency resiliency for critical data recovery.
“Kubernetes alone can’t meet all of an enterprise’s application needs,” Murli Thirumale, co-founder and CEO of Portworx, told eWEEK. “There are needs around security monitoring, and particularly data storage and data management that are needed to really allow adoption of containers and Kubernetes orchestration across a wide set of application platforms.”
Kubernetes is a widely used open-source platform for managing, deploying and running containers at scale and integrates a vast array of native capabilities. Thirumale said that the adoption of Kubernetes has been driving new momentum around the need for advanced data management capabilities, which is what Portworx provides.
Portworx was founded in 2014 at the earliest stages of the container movement and has steadily increased its market presence and capabilities in the years since. Alongside the Portworx Enterprise 2.1 update, the company also announced that it has raised $27 million in a new Series C round of funding that included the participation of Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp.
“Portworx has been in the business now for over four years, and we’re beginning to see rapid customer adoption and quite a lot of expansion of our platform,” Thirumale said.
PX-Security
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) has been part of Kubernetes since the 1.8 release in September 2017. What Portworx Enterprise 2.1 is now providing with PX-Security is a deeper level of policy granularity in its own RBAC implementation for data management.
Michael Ferranti, vice president of product marketing, explained that with PX-Security, an organization can have a single namespace where an individual or group can have similar access levels for read, write, create and delete operations. Ferranti noted that PX-Security will also integrate with an organization’s existing access control system, including Active Directory.
Policy is often tied to compliance and the need for some form of GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) technology. At this point, Ferranti said that Portworx does not have a formal partnership with a GRC vendor, but he did note that Portworx supports industry standards and can be integrated into standards-based systems that make use of OpenID.
PX-DR
The new PX-DR disaster recovery feature in Portworx Enterprise 2.1 goes beyond what the company had delivered in its 2.0 release with data portability for backup and availability. Ferranti said Portworx already has high-availability features that enable a running workload to be rescheduled to run on other Kubernetes pods in a cluster to enable consistent availability and performance.
With PX-DR, Portworx is providing high-availability options across multiple data centers that are located within the same metropolitan areas. For data centers that are not as close together, PX-DR now provides the ability to perform continuous incremental backups for disaster recovery and resilience.
Looking forward, Thirumale said that as adoption of Kubernetes and cloud-native container deployments grow, Portworx will be adding more capabilities to meet expanding enterprise requirements.
“People build a platform as a service for containers, and then move more and more applications on to containers within that platform,” Thirumale said. “So we see companies moving from a project base for containers to an enterprise-wide use.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
