We’re excited to announce the general availability of Portworx Enterprise 3.5, the latest release of the industry’s leading Kubernetes data platform. This release builds on our mission to simplify storage and data management for modern applications running in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, bringing major improvements in performance, scale, consolidation, backup optimization, and operational automation.
Let’s take a closer look at what’s new in Portworx Enterprise (PX-E) 3.5.
PX-StoreV2: Now the Default for New Clusters
In Portworx Enterprise 3.5, PX-StoreV2 becomes the default for greenfield deployments. PX-StoreV2 is designed for better scalability and performance, offering improvements such as journal I/O profile enhancements and efficient metadata management. For customers still using PX-StoreV1, we now support in-place migration to PX-StoreV2 with a new semi-automated migration script that preserves data while moving workloads node-by-node to the new storage engine.
Double the Number of Volume Attachments
Modern Kubernetes workloads demand massive scalability and density. PX-E 3.5 doubles the number of volume attachments, increasing the supported volume attachment limit from 512 to 1024 volumes per node. This enables significantly higher workload consolidation, particularly useful for virtualized workloads and high-density platforms such as OpenShift Virtualization.
2X Performance Boost for PX-Fast Workloads
Thanks to updates in the PX-Fuse driver, customers using PX-Fast volumes can now experience up to 2X performance gains for random read/write I/O patterns. This is achieved by increasing the number of processing threads to better utilize system resources, delivering higher throughput for performance-critical applications.
Smarter Cleanup with Non-Blocking Background Deletes
Large-scale data deletions no longer have to slow down the rest of your environment. PX-E 3.5 introduces Non-Blocking Device Deletes (NBDD), which minimizes latency spikes and I/O pauses during volume and snapshot deletions. Fine-grained control over discard operations enables safe and tunable background cleanup – especially useful for applications with frequent snapshot cycles like backup and CI/CD pipelines.
Backup and Restore Optimization: 100MB CloudSnap Objects
PX-E 3.5 enhances CloudSnap performance by supporting larger 100MB objects for backup and restore operations. This is particularly beneficial when working with slow object stores, reducing the number of objects per backup and accelerating transfer times. This feature is now configurable via a cluster-wide environment variable.
Support for SUSE Virtualization
Portworx Enterprise 3.5 provides general availability for SUSE Virtualization and together they deliver a unified solution for managing virtualized workloads on Kubernetes. This helps enterprises lower their total cost of ownership (TCO), reduce single-vendor risk, and accelerate IT modernization by simplifying storage management, enhancing application portability. The solution enables a flexible virtualization platform, freeing IT teams from proprietary ecosystems and offering a clear path away from a dependency on vendors like VMware. For more information on SUSE Virtualization support, click here.
Improved Application Mobility and Virtualization Support
We’ve added several features that enhance data mobility and virtualization support in PX-E 3.5:
- Live Migrations of RWX raw block volumes with SUSE Virtualization
- OpenShift Hosted Control Plane support for nested virtualization (OpenShift Virtualization on OpenShift)
- Support for CDI cloning for efficient VM replica placement and lifecycle management
Operational Enhancements for Automation and Scale
Portworx Enterprise 3.5 introduces new capabilities that improve operational efficiency across multi-node and multi-availability zone environments:
- Autoscale storage nodes when adding new compute to a cluster
- Auto-rebalance KVDB nodes across failure domains to maintain quorum automatically and eliminate manual intervention
These enhancements continue our investment in zero-touch operations and automation to make Kubernetes data infrastructure simpler to operate at scale.
Expanded Licensing and Ecosystem Support
PX-E 3.5 introduces license support for PX-KV SKU, enabling new VM migration paths and SKU-level enforcement.
Support has also been added for PX CloudSnaps via CSI snapshot APIs, helping standardize and integrate PX-E with upstream Kubernetes features.
With new capabilities to support more VMs, faster snapshots, and intelligent cleanup, PX-E 3.5 enables teams to run more with less – and with fewer operational headaches.
What’s Next?
Portworx Enterprise 3.5 delivers critical capabilities to help organizations:
- Scale high-density Kubernetes environments with confidence
- Improve performance for critical I/O-intensive workloads
- Optimize backups and disaster recovery strategies
- Enable seamless mobility across modern virtualization and hybrid cloud environments
To get started:
Documentation and Resources
For more information on Portworx Enterprise 3.5, including installation and upgrade guidance, refer to the following resources:
We’re proud to continue our tradition of innovation with Portworx Enterprise 3.5 and can’t wait to see what you build next.
