Portworx Releases PXEnterprise Platform for ContainerDefined Storage in Production Environments

Portworx has released the PX-Enterprise platform offering a purpose-built, enterprise-class storage container-defined storage for containers used in production environments. 

The company says that by using PX-Enterprise, companies can cut the cost of traditional storage arrays and virtual machines by up to 70 percent. Portworx reports early success with application use cases such as technical computing, databases (e.g., Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Hadoop, Spark), content management and video processing. 

PX-Enterprise provides data persistence across nodes; allows storage policies such as class of service, IOPS and availability to be set at a container level; and offers container-granular snapshots and replication. The solution also enables companies to provision storage for containerized apps in second; run storage at bare-metal speed; provision and schedule storage to automatically respond to container bursts; and manage storage features on a per-container basis.

Taking a fundamentally distributed approach, Portworx turns commodity X86 hardware into a converged storage node that can be rapidly scaled across a cluster of nodes and automatically provisioned with any Docker-ready scheduler.

Features and benefits of PX-Enterprise include:

- Scale-out block storage deployed as a container, which minimizes required resources.

- Container-granular controls for storage capacity, performance and availability.

- Container-granular snapshots, which require less storage capacity.

- Replication, which adds an extra measure of redundancy

- The ability to deploy in the cloud, on-premises or both, thus preventing vendor lock-in

A RESTful API and a command-line interface, which allows easy deployment and integration with containers.

- Unified storage with a global file namespace that makes storage easy to deploy and manage.

- Multi-cluster visibility for unified storage management.

- Predictive capacity management that provides proactive alerts before storage capacity is reached.

PX-Enterprise will be available in late July, 2016.