Portworx Enterprise is a Container-Native Storage (CNS) product, owned by all-flash SAN/NAS vendor Pure Storage. Deployed on industry-standard servers (nodes) in a cluster architecture, Portworx Enterprise software runs as a container on each node, pooling its internal storage devices. It can incorporate SAN- attached storage systems and cloud-based storage as well.
CNS is software-defined storage (SDS) that is embedded in a container cluster, providing a virtualized pool of storage using devices internal to each host. This is like the way SDS is embedded in a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) cluster except that the software runs in a container, instead of as a virtual machine. CNS in a container orchestration platform (usually Kubernetes) is somewhat analogous to VMware vSAN running as a service in vSphere, creating a scale-out compute environment.
The benefits of CNS with Kubernetes are also like those of HCI. CNS eliminates the need for external storage systems to support containers and can scale with the Kubernetes cluster. As a storage layer, CNS is integrated into Kubernetes, simplifying management compared with an external storage system.
Portworx launched its container native storage in 2016, and Pure Storage acquired the startup for $370 million in 2020. While Pure has enabled its flash storage systems to serve as storage for Portworx (and provide features such as data reduction), it also continues to sell Portworx as a hardware agnostic software-defined storage platform.
Portworx Enterprise provides file and object (via Pure FlashBlade and AWS S3) storage directly to stateful applications running on those nodes through a container orchestrator. Each node can be configured for storage and compute in hyperconverged mode or for storage only in disaggregated mode.
Pure Storage Portworx Enterprise Product Review Includes:
Overview
Highlights
Usage
Architecture Deployment
EvaluScale Product Review Methodology
Evaluator Group’s Opinion
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