Portworx PX-Enterprise

Silver winner in Storage magazine and SearchStorage's 2018 Products of the Year software-defined and cloud storage category.

Portworx PX-Enterprise helps customers deploy persistent, cloud-native storage with containerized applications.

The judging panel scored PX-Enterprise highest in innovation and value among the 11 software-defined and cloud storage finalists, helping it grab the silver medal. One judge said the Portworx Inc. software is much-needed to push forward container deployments because they can be more cost-effective than virtual machine-centric approaches. Portworx PX-Enterprise is designed to complement container schedulers such as Kubernetes, Mesosphere and Docker Swarm.

One example of the many new features added to PX-Enterprise in 2018 is 3DSnap technology to enable enterprise customers to group and snapshot persistent data volumes as a single unit for backup. 3DSnap can facilitate the backup and recovery of complex applications through application-consistent snapshots of Kubernetes StatefulSets.

PX-Enterprise also added a "Kubernetes Per Volume Secrets" feature to enable customers to encrypt individual Kubernetes volumes with different keys in multi-tenant environments. Users previously had to encrypt all volumes created from a StorageClass with the same key.

A new GUI can help users manage multi-cloud container clusters. The redesigned GUI includes a node map showing the location of servers and a snapshot timeline to assist with backup and recovery management.

Portworx PX-Enterprise also added automated storage provisioning for vSphere and Pivotal Container Service for Kubernetes (PKS) and a new software development kit. The OpenStorage SDK lets engineers use native calls or RESTful APIs to get information on how storage is allocated, consumed, encrypted, backed up and managed across multiple clouds.

PX-Enterprise integrates with all major Kubernetes distributions and container orchestration systems, including Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, Azure Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, Red Hat OpenShift, Mesosphere DC/OS and Docker Enterprise Edition.

Subscription-based pricing for Portworx PX-Enterprise starts at $1,000 per node, per year.

Portworx emerged from stealth in 2015. Startup co-founders Murli Thirumale, Goutham Rao and Vinod Jayaraman previously launched Ocarina Networks, a compression and deduplicaton specialist acquired by Dell in 2010.