Portworx Enterprise 2.2 Addresses Top Challenges for Enterprise Container Adoption: Data Security, Data Protection, and DR

Today, just in time for KubeCon, we’re excited to announce the latest release of Portworx Enterprise. In this release, available June 22, we’re adding new features focused on security, data protection, and disaster recovery giving our customers a one-command backup and recovery experience for complex applications running on Kubernetes. As a result, they have more control over their mission-critical data.

With these new capabilities, we hope to radically expand the number of enterprise applications that can run on Kubernetes by solving hard, non-negotiable business requirements like data security and disaster recovery for our large and growing global customer base which includes innovative companies like T-Mobile, Comcast, GE Digital, Lufthansa Systems, HPE and dozens of members of the Fortune Global 2000.

This release is well timed based on the responses we received in the our 2019 Annual Container Adoption Survey, also published today. First, containerization continues to grow rapidly in the enterprise, with 87 percent of respondents running container technologies – a massive increase from 55 percent in 2017 – with 9 in 10 of these enterprises running them in production.

However, security, data management, and multi-cloud operations remain leading barriers to enterprise container adoption, with 40 percent of respondents citing data management, and 36 percent citing multi-cloud and cross-data center management among their top three concerns. Additionally, when asked to name their top three storage challenges, respondents most frequently cited data security (56%), concerns about data loss (46%), and planning for DR and business continuity (40%). Portworx Enterprise 2.2 addresses these challenges directly to give enterprises more control over their mission critical data by making essential capabilities like disaster recovery, business continuity, backups, restores and migrations of containerized apps faster and easier, all while maintaining data security.

Kubernetes application backups in a single command

Enterprises running mission-critical data-rich applications in Kubernetes are required to back up application data and the Kubernetes objects that define application configuration. Traditional enterprise backup solutions only focus on data, making recovering applications time-consuming and risky. Alternatively, container-focused backup solutions only backup Kubernetes objects, requiring customers to solve data backup themselves. With Portworx Enterprise 2.2, enterprises for the first time can easily back up entire Kubernetes applications to any S3-compatible object store, including data and Kubernetes objects, with a single command. All data is backed up in its encrypted state using a key that only the customer controls, ensuring that bad actors never see the unencrypted data.

Restore complex applications in a single command

In the same way Portworx Enterprise backs up application data and application configuration, enterprises can now restore a Kubernetes application with a single command. Restores are not limited to single containers: complex applications made up of multiple containers can be restored using Portworx Enterprise Group Snapshots, which create an application-consistent copy of distributed applications. As with backup data security, restored data can only be decrypted with the customer’s key, ensuring security for the entire backup and recovery workflow.

Seamless Kubernetes application migration

Extending Portworx Enterprise’s ability to migrate application data and Kubernetes pod configurations between clusters, enterprises can now move applications to different namespaces within the same Kubernetes cluster, providing more control over where and how they run their applications.

In addition to the above capabilities, Portworx Enterprise 2.2 provides application caching and CRI-O support. Portworx Application Caching provides a built-in data caching layer to speed up reads and writes, improving application performance, and support for CRI-O enables the Open Container Initiative-based implementation of Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface used on OpenShift 4.

Portworx Enterprise 2.2 will be available on June 22, 2019. We hope that you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.