The News: Pure Storage, a supplier of data storage technology and services announced a series of updates to its Portworx Data Services, including general availability (GA) of Portworx Data Services, the next generation of Portworx Enterprise, and GA of Portworx Backup-as-a-service. Read the Pure Storage Press Release here.
Pure Storage Expands Portworx Portfolio to Make Kubernetes More Rewarding for Developers
Analyst Take: I anticipate that Pure Storage can expand its market presence through its new portfolio expansion, especially through the general availability of the Portworx Data Services offering developed as a Kubernetes (K8S) Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) platform. By focusing on developer top priorities, such as the automation of the vast array of DB management and administration tasks, I believe Pure Storage is better positioned now to make further inroads with DevOps and platform teams.
Since Portworx Data Services is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, users gain more financial flexibility by paying only for the data services they consume, including pay-as-you-go and pre-purchased hours options.
Customers can use Portworx Backup-as-a-Service to assure application and data protection through rapid recovery coupled with the improved granularity key to safeguarding data at the application level across K8S services such as Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services, and VMware Tanzu. As such, they gain application consistency for distributed databases and enabling apps to run across multiple machines.
Through the next generation of Portworx Enterprise and its support of consistent storage and data management layer that runs any K8S distribution across any cloud infrastructure, customers can run K8S in production across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
From my perspective, developers are increasing their demand for reliable data services that can optimize their application development process and value as-a-service consumption flexibility, however they assign top priority to avoiding management of DBs. Through Portworx Data Services DBaaS capabilities, organizations can automatically run managed data services across virtually any cloud on an affordable basis while also avoiding lock-in to a specific cloud service.
I expect that the five key use cases Pure Storage is emphasizing with the Portworx portfolio enhancements – multi-tenant platform-aaS with application I/O control; 5G/edge with Ipv6; lift and shift of legacy apps with K8S virtualization; unified storage overlay with Object Store Service; and hot data tier backed by high performance storage with PX-fast – can accelerate Pure Storage’s Portworx Data Services sales cycles across DevOps and platform development teams.
The new Portworx portfolio enhancements I believe provide more warrant for Pure Storage’s 2020 $370 million cash acquisition of Portworx. Overall, I see Pure Storage is now delivering the DBaaS across demanding Kubernetes application development environments that flexibly provides the balance between developer prioritization of rapid ease of use combined with elastic scaling and automated capabilities with the stringent data protection, key management, and security policies of organizations.
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.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M Raises the Cloud Database Market Stakes
Oracle MySQL HeatWave: Teaching the Competition a Lesson in ML
Is This the End of Tiered Storage?
Image Credit: Pure Storage
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
