Pure Storage announced its intention to acquire Portworx in mid-September. Around that time I had the opportunity to talk about the news with Goutham Rao (Portworx CTO) and Matt Kixmoeller (Pure Storage VP, Strategy) and thought I’d share some brief thoughts here.
The News
Pure and Portworx have entered an agreement that will see Pure pay approximately $370M US in cash. Portworx will form a new Cloud Native Business Unit inside Pure to be led by Portworx CEO Murli Thirumale. All Portworx founders are joining Pure, with Pure investing significantly to grow the new business unit. According to Pure, “Portworx software to continue as-is, supporting deployments in any cloud and on-premises, and on any bare metal, VM, or array-based storage”. It was also noted that “Portworx solutions to be integrated with Pure yet maintain a commitment to an open ecosystem”.
About Portworx
Described as the “leading Kubernetes data services platform”, Portworx was founded in 2014 in Los Altos, CA. It runs a 100% software, subscription, and cloud business model with development and support sites in California, India, and Eastern Europe. The product has been GA since 2017, and is used by some of the largest enterprise and Cloud / SaaS companies globally.
What’s A Portworx?
The idea behind Portworx is that it gives you data services for any application, on any Kubernetes distribution, running on any cloud, any infrastructure, and at any stage of the application lifecycle. To that end, it’s broken up into a bunch of different components, and runs in the K8s control plane adjacent to the applications.
PX-Store
- Software-defined storage layer that automates container storage for developers and admins
- Consistent storage APIs: cloud, bare metal, or arrays
PX-Migrate
- Easily move applications between clusters
- Enables hybrid cloud and multi-cloud mobility
PX-Backup
- Application-consistent backup for cloud native apps with all k8s artefacts and state
- Backup to any cloud or on-premises object storage
PX-Secure
- Implement consistent encryption and security policies across clouds
- Enable multi-tenancy with access controls
PX-DR
- Sync and async replication between Availability Zones and regions
- Zero RPO active / active for high resiliency
PX-Autopilot
- GitOps-driven automation allows for easier platform for non-storage experts to deploy stateful applications, monitors everything about an application, reacts and prevents problems from happening
- Auto-scale storage as your app grows to reduce costs
How It Fits Together
When you bring Portworx into the Pure Storage picture, you start to see that it fits well with the existing Pure Storage picture. In the picture below you’ll also see support for the standard container storage interface (CSI) to work with other vendors.
[image courtesy of Pure Storage]
Also worth noting is that PX-Essentials remains free forever for workloads under 5TB and 5 nodes).
Thoughts and Further Reading
I think this is a great move by Pure, mainly because it lends them a whole lot more credibility with the DevOps folks. Pure was starting to make inroads with Pure Storage Orchestrator, and I think this move will strengthen that story. Giving Portworx access to Pure’s salesforce globally is also going to broaden its visibility in the market and open up doors to markets that may have been difficult to get into previously.
Persistent storage for containers is heating up. As Rao pointed out in our discussion, “as container adoption grows, storage becomes a problem”. Portworx already had a good story to tell in this space, and Pure is no slouch when it comes to delivering advanced storage capabilities across a variety of platforms. I like that the messaging has been firmly based in maintaining the openness of the platform and I’m interested to see what other integrations happen as the two companies start working more closely together. If you’d like another perspective on the news, check out Chris Evans’s article here.