Tag Archives: portworx

Brisbane VMUG – November 2022

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The November 2022 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Thursday 24th November at the Cube (QUT) from 5pm – 7pm. It’s sponsored by Pure Storage and promises to be a great afternoon. Register here.

Raise Your Kubernetes Infrastructure Status From Zero to Hero

If your developers or platform architects are asking you for storage features commonly found in your vSphere infrastructure but targeted towards Kubernetes, you are not alone – let Portworx help you go from “I don’t know” to “No problem”!

Locking yourself into a storage solution that is dependent on specific infrastructure is a sure way to reduce efficiency and flexibility for your developers and where their applications can run – Portworx elevates you to “Hero” status by:

  • Providing your team a consistent, cloud native storage layer you can utilise on ANY Kubernetes platform – whether on-premises or in the public cloud
  • Giving you the capability to provide Kubernetes native DR and business continuity not only for your persistent storage, but all of the Kubernetes objects associated with your applications (think SRM and vMSC for Kubernetes!)
  • Enabling you to provide Kubernetes-aware data protection, including ransomware protection and 3-2-1 backup compliance with RBAC roles that can fit the existing policies within your organisation
  • Delighting your developers that need access to modern databases such as Kafka, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and more by delivering self-service deployments with best practices “built-in”, which accelerate development cycles without a dinosaur DBA or learning complex Kubernetes operators

Come join us to see how we can create your “Better Together” story with Tanzu and give you the tools and knowledge to bring agility for your developers to your underlying infrastructure for modern applications running on Kubernetes!

Mike Carpendale

Mike joined Pure Storage in April 2021 as the APJ Regions Platform Architect. He has 20+ years experience in the industry, ranging from his expert level hands-on experience of designing and managing large scale on-prem as-a-service offerings underpinned by VMware, to his more recent work in the public cloud. 

 

PIZZA AND NETWORKING BREAK!

 

This will be followed by:

VMware Session

Peter Hauck – Senior Solutions Engineer

VMware

 

And we will be finishing off with:

 

Preparing for VMware Certifications

With the increase of position requirements in the last few years, certifications help you demonstrate your skills and move you a step forward on getting better jobs. In this Community Ssession we will help you understand how to prepare for a VMware certification exam and some useful tips you can use during the exam.

We will talk about:

Different types of exams

  • How to schedule an exam
  • Where to get material to study
  • Lessons learned from the field per type of exam

Francisco Fernandez Cardarelli – Senior Consultant (4 x VCIX)

 

Soft drinks and vBeers will be available throughout the evening! We look forward to seeing you there! Doors open at 5pm. Please make your way to The Cube.

Random Short Take #73

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Welcome to Random Short Take #73. Let’s get random.

Random Short Take #63

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Welcome to Random Short take #63. It’s Friday morning, and the weekend is in sight.

  • I really enjoyed this article from Glenn K. Lockwood about how just looking for an IOPS figure can be a silly thing to do, particularly with HPC workloads. “If there’s one constant in HPC, it’s that everyone hates I/O.  And there’s a good reason: it’s a waste of time because every second you wait for I/O to complete is a second you aren’t doing the math that led you to use a supercomputer in the first place.”
  • Speaking of things that are a bit silly, it seems like someone thought getting on the front foot with some competitive marketing videos was a good idea. It rarely is though.
  • Switching gears a little, you may have been messing about with Tanzu Community Edition and asking yourself how you could SSH to a node. Ask no more, as Mark has your answer.
  • Speaking of storage companies that are pretty pleased with how things are going, Weka has put out this press release on its growth.
  • Still on press releases, Imply had some good news to share at Druid Summit recently.
  • Intrigued by Portworx and want to know more? Check out these two blog posts on configuring multi-cloud application portability (here and here) – they are excellent. Hat tip to my friend Mike at Pure Storage for the links.
  • I loved this article on project heroics from Chris Wahl. I’ve got a lot more to say about this and the impact this behaviour can have on staff but some of it is best not committed to print at this stage.
  • Finally, I replaced one of my receivers recently and cursed myself once again for not using banana plugs. They just make things a bit easier to deal with.

Pure Storage Acquires Portworx

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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.