The News: Pure Storage now offers Portworx Enterprise 3.0 as a fully managed, Kubernetes-ready service that makes it easier for enterprises to run their business-critical Kubernetes applications in production. The new fully managed Portworx Enterprise 3.0 service is a data plane or overlay that enterprises can run atop any Kubernetes platform, including Amazon EKS, Red Hat OpenShift, and others. Read the full Press Release about the new Portworx Enterprise 3.0.

Pure Storage Bolsters Portworx Enterprise Managed Kubernetes

Analyst Take: Pure Storage taking the initiative to rework its suite of Portworx offerings to deliver them to customers as an overlay for their often-complex Kubernetes applications is a great advance for users. Many enterprise Kubernetes users love the benefits that Kubernetes can deliver, but they are often not happy that the still-young container orchestration and management systems can be challenging to configure and use.

That is where Portworx Enterprise 3.0 can help, by bringing the management layer in via a simpler, more flexible Software-as-a-Service approach. This is a great idea at just the right time as often-understaffed IT teams continue to face serious productivity pressures due to a lack of fully trained and certified IT personnel, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and related labor challenges.

The beauty of the managed Portworx Enterprise 3.0 services is that it allows much faster deployment of Kubernetes data on any cloud from any vendor, or on any on-premises storage systems, according to the company. For DevOps teams, this means that they can now operate and scale their critical containerized apps into production in seconds instead of in weeks or months. This is a game-changing advance for enterprises that are already coping with supply chain issues, a volatile economy, and a wide range of other complications in recent years.

Using Portworx Enterprise 3.0, IT teams will be able to experience a fully managed Kubernetes service that will be easy to use while not requiring container experience for users. So, instead of complex Day 0 or Day 2 operations checklists usually found with new deployments, users can get things going with their Kubernetes clusters going in just a few clicks, the company says.

Portworx works with containerized workloads that are used with file, block, and object storage.

The Power Behind Portworx Enterprise 3.0

Bringing in an overlay that can work with any cloud or on-premises systems while using any Kubernetes platform means solving some technical challenges to make it all work.

For that, Portworx and Pure Storage brought in a new PX-Fast capability which provides high performance for low latency data services such as Kafka, Elastic, and MongoDB. The service also offers high throughput for online transaction processing (OLTP), online analytical processing (OLAP), and machine learning (ML) workloads. Meanwhile, it also provides throughput and IOPS that are almost as efficient as writing directly to a high-performance NVMe-based infrastructure, according to the company. The big benefit of this architecture is that PX-Fast makes Kubernetes data storage appear as though it is local storage for containerized apps and data, which generates observable performance benefits.

Another benefit of using Portworx Enterprise 3.0 is that customers can keep using the storage systems and cloud services they are already using, the importance of which cannot be overstated. This hardware and cloud flexibility is huge and allows customers to continue to benefit from their existing storage hardware and cloud vendor investments, while reducing costly and disruptive system changes.

Portworx Enterprise 3.0 Overview

These are solid moves by Pure Storage, which offers data storage systems and services, and its Portworx division and team, as they continue to update and expand the Portworx product lines for customers.

These Portworx portfolio enhancements also further prove the value and wisdom of Pure Storage’s $370 million cash acquisition of Portworx back in 2020, which added important and timely Kubernetes capabilities to the company.

Pure Storage delivered a healthy fiscal second quarter earnings report on August 31, including revenue of $646.8 million, up 30 percent year-over-year; and subscription services annual recurring revenue of $955 million, which was up 31 percent YoY. These encouraging numbers solidify the company’s direction and strategy, and the new Portworx Enterprise 3.0 changes and enhancements provide an exclamation point on those financial successes.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.