The Storage Platform

for Kubernetes

Now available for

Microsoft Azure
High performance storage, HA, DR, backup,
and security for stateful services running on
Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service
 By 2022, more than 20% of enterprise
primary storage capacity will be
deployed to support container
workloads, up from less than 1% today

Gartner

Portworx Enterprise is the cloud native

storage and data management platform that
enterprises trust to manage data in containers.

*Gartner, Docker Containers Will Impact Enterprise Storage Infrastructure,

Julia Palmer, Arun Chandrasekaran, 08 February 2017
Run mission critical, stateful
applications on Microsoft Azure
Kubernetes Service with Portworx
In order to run stateful services and applications on Kubernetes, you need scalable persistent storage
similar to what is used for VMs, but optimized for containers. Legacy storage systems don’t scale to the
levels achievable with Kubernetes.

Now, with Portworx and Microsoft Azure, you can:

• Operate at enterprise scale. Get the same scalability for data that Azure provides
for compute. Easily create thousands of volume in minutes.
• Meet strict SLAs. Run stateful applications on Azure Kubernetes Service and still
meet strict SLAs and regulatory requirements with high availability, Kubernetes
integrated disaster recovery.
• Move apps and data seamlessly. Migrate and backup entire applications,
including data, between clusters in a single data center or cloud, or between clouds.
• Achieve Zero RPO and < 1 minute RTO Disaster Recovery for mission-critical
data services.
• Simplify data access. Portworx simplifies data access and analysis using leading
open-source SQL, NoSQL, Big Data and AI/ML technologies without requiring
central IT to give up control.
• Secure data automatically. Eliminate security risks with automatic policy-based
data encryption in transit and at rest, as well as complete role-based access
controls integrated with corporate authentication systems.
About this guide
This guide will help you learn more about containers, why
high performance storage, HA, DR, backup, and security
optimized for containers is critical for enterprise application
deployments on Kubernetes, and how to deploy Portworx
with Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service.

In this Guide
Containers: A New Paradigm In Computing 5

Top 5 Production Operations Problems Solved by Portworx 7

Container Native Storage on Microsoft Azure 9

Portworx Performance 23

About Portworx 25

Additional Resources and Trial 28

 A new paradigm in computing.
New requirements for storage.

As more enterprise workloads move to

containers, can your storage keep up?

In a hybrid and multi-cloud world, where compute resources are distributed

across public and private clouds, machines (even virtual ones) are no longer the
right building blocks for applications.

Kubernetes provides the ability to rapidly deploy and scale enterprise applications
across multiple VMs using lightweight containers. Containers free applications
from the underlying OS, making them more portable and efficient at utilizing
available compute resources, but require application-focused management
technologies for critical capabilities like storage.

5 | Portworx
Machine-Defined vs Application-Defined

World World

Focus is on machine provisoning and lifecycle Focus is on app-aware infrastructure provisoning and
management. lifecycle management.
Driven by a VM, Storage and Network Admin Driven by an end user (application owner)

Virtual Machines Apps

UBUNTU
RHEL
CENTOS
Servers
LUNS

Host Host
Storage Storage Storage Storage

Storage Storage Storage

Overcome Data Gravity with Containerized Storage

Traditional enterprise storage revolves around the virtual machine. But when apps are packaged
as containers and run across many different VMs, VM-based storage, backup, DR and data
security solutions no longer apply.

You need the same performance, reliability and security provided by traditional storage, but
optimized for the application-centric world of Kubernetes. That’s what Portworx provides.

6
Top 5 Production Operations Problems
Solved by Portworx
High availability
HA for all of your databases and stateful containers.

Backup and recovery

Seamlessly backup any application running on
Portworx solves the five most Kubernetes to Microsoft Azure Blob storage or any
common problems DevOps S3-compatible object storage with the click of a
teams encounter when button. Recover to any environment just as easily.

running database containers

Disaster recovery
and other stateful services in
No matter how essential your application is, run it
production. with confidence on Kubernetes with Portworx.
Achieve Zero RPO Disaster Recovery for data
centers in a metropolitan area as well as
continuous backups across the WAN for an even
greater level of protection.

Application migrations
Easily move entire applications, including their data,
between clusters, clouds, and on-prem data centers.

Data security
Highly secure, key-managed encryption and data
access controls.

7 | Portworx
“Our Kubernetes environment relies on multiple SQL and NoSQL
databases. We compared many cloud native storage solutions in order
to provide the most reliable, performant and available service to our
customers. After a rigorous evaluation, we chose Portworx not only
because their technology is top notch, but because we can count on the
Portworx team to support us through our cloud native journey.”

Dailymotion, a Vivendi Company

8
Container-native storage—built for
Kubernetes. Now available for
Microsoft Azure
With Portworx Enterprise, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service development teams can spend
less time on storage and data management and more time driving innovation. Portworx
Enterprise enables mission critical, stateful workloads, like databases and data analytics, to run
on Azure with high performance and high availability throughout the entire application lifecycle.

Deploy Portworx with Azure Kubernetes Service

Portworx enables data availability, data security, backup and disaster recovery for
Kubernetes-based applications running on Azure Kubernetes Service deployments.

There are two ways to deploy Portworx to manage Kubernetes clusters on Azure:

Bring Your Own Portworx License

Portworx has been extensively tested and validated to be compatible with Azure
Kubernetes Service. Extend your existing Portworx licenses to Azure Kubernetes clusters
or contact your Portworx or Microsoft Azure representatives to explore additional
licensing options.

Azure Marketplace Available Q2-2020

The Portworx software-defined storage solution for
Azure Kubernetes Service can be provisioned for
Kubernetes clusters via the Azure Marketplace.

9 | Portworx
Portworx provides a single data management layer for all stateful
services running on Azure Kubernetes Service:

• Dynamically provisioned, high-performance storage • Zero RPO disaster recovery

• High availability, even across racks and AZs • Data encryption and security
• Seamless migration, backup, and recovery • Automated capacity management
Dynamically provisioned, high
performance storage

PX - Store

Get the future of storage now—

keep your existing hardware
Built from the ground up for containers, PX-Store provides cloud native storage, with built-in HA, for
applications running on-prem, in the cloud, and in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. PX-Store takes
your underlying hardware, even your cloud block storage or an existing SAN or NAS, and turns it into a
cluster-wide storage pool for all your containerized applications.

Storage at the speed of Kubernetes

As the foundation for Portworx Enterprise, PX-Store provides the reliability, performance and data
protection you expect from an enterprise storage company, but delivered as a container, and managed
100% via Azure Kubernetes Service and other leading container platforms.

11 | Portworx
“A no brainer… running stateful applications on Kubernetes remains
a challenge today, so enabling Portworx on our Kubernetes clusters
helps to ease the burden… Esri saved six months of development
time by using Portworx.”

ESRI relies on Portworx to provide persistent storage with replication,

resilience, high availability, data encryption and disaster recovery for
its new IoT service running on Azure Kubernetes Service.

12
Centralized control for all your stateful
apps running on Kubernetes

PX - Central

Your data, visualized

A picture is worth a thousand words. PX-Central gives you a centralized view of all your data rich
applications running on Kubernetes_ even if they are running across multiple clouds and
on-premises data centers.

Built-in monitoring and metrics

PX-Central comes with built-in Prometheus monitoring and a Grafana dashboard to visualize
your most important metrics like CPU, memory, I/O and disk utilization.

13 | Portworx
14
Zero worries with Zero RPO DR
and continuous backups

PX - DR

Zero RPO DR
PX-DR extends the high availability data protection included in PX-Store with
Zero RPO Disaster Recovery for data centers in a metropolitan area.

Continuous backup across the globe

For DR needs that span a country or globe, PX-DR offers continuous
incremental-backups to keep an up-to-date backup of mission critical apps
staged in case disaster strikes.

15 | Portworx
PX-DR provides data protection for applications
running across multiple data centers

16
Back up and recover
with just one-click

PX - Backup

PX-Backup allows you to capture entire applications, including data, application configuration and
Kubernetes objects, and move them to any backup location at the click of a button. Recover entire
applications just as easily.

Backup to any S3-compatible storage

PX-Backup captures application data, configuration, and Kubernetes objects as a single unit and
enables enterprises to place this critical data into any S3-compatible object storage:

• Continuous backups across global data centers

• Point-and-click recovery for any Kubernetes app
• Backup and recover cloud volumes from Microsoft Azure Managed
Disks, Amazon Web Services EBS, and Google Persistent Disks
• Backup multi-node distributed databases like Cassandra, Kafka,
Elasticsearch, and MongoDB
• Fulfill compliance and governance responsibilities with a single pane
of glass

17 | Portworx
PX-Backup captures
the entire app

18
Move apps & data between clusters or
clouds with a single command

PX - Migrate

With PX-Migrate, migrate entire applications, including data, application configuration and Kubernetes
objects, between clusters in a single data center or cloud, or between clouds, with a single command.

App-consistent, not just crash consistent

The typical Kubernetes app is composed of multiple stateful pods, so you can’t perform a migration
with only a single snapshot. PX-Migrate makes migrating multi-pod applications easy with application-
consistent snapshots of complex apps.

19 | Portworx
Kubernetes without
compromise

PX - Secure

Bring-your-own-key encryption
PX-Secure enables encryption of Kubernetes data at
the volume, storage class or cluster level.

Integrated access controls

Define authentication, authorization and
ownership of data volumes in Kubernetes
through direct integration with corporate
authentication systems like Active
Directory or LDAP.

20
Automate Kubernetes
Storage Management

PX - Autopilot

Portworx dynamic volume provisioning and on-demand

storage resizing allow enterprises to avoid over-provisioning
storage resources

Portworx PX-Autopilot enables you to reduce cloud storage costs by intelligently

provisioning Azure managed disk storage only when it is needed, eliminating the
inefficiency of paying for cloud storage when it is provisioned, rather than when it is
consumed.

21 | Portworx
By thin provisioning, you can save

up to 50% on storage costs

Storage actually provisioned and paid for

Thinly provisioned storage

Traditional over-provsioning Thin-provisioning with Portworx PX-AutoPilot

100GB 100GB 100GB 100GB

100GB 100GB 100GB 100GB

100GB 100GB 100GB 100GB

100GB 100GB 100GB 100GB

100GB 100GB 100GB 100GB

For example, with Portworx, an internal IT team can provide 10 application teams with
a PostgreSQL database of 100 GB max each. While most storage solutions would
require you set aside 1 terabyte of capacity initially, even though the vast majority of
that storage will be underutilized, Portworx “thin provisions” the storage, such that,
only a fraction need actually be provisioned, perhaps 500 GB

22
Lighten up. Compute more.
Containers are dramatically more lightweight than virtual
machines. This allows you to significantly increase the density of
applications per host, depending on your environment.

Due to increased average density, enterprises report being able to reduce their total server footprint
overall through containerization initiatives. Portworx plays a critical role in these infrastructure
savings by increasing the number of databases and other stateful services that can run on a single
host. Portworx delivers all this without impacting performance or stability.

Up to

40% reduction
in compute footprint
When using application replication to increase
read throughput across a greater number of
hosts, Portworx can reduce your compute
footprint for stateful services. For example, with
Portworx you can reduce the number of replicas
from 5 containers to 3 containers (40% savings).

23 | Portworx
 3.2X
in write performance
increase

In performance tests compared to a single MongoDB container, Portworx improved write

performance by 319%. Additionally, compared to a MongoDB replica set of three containers,
Portworx increased write performance by 10% but consumed only one third of the compute
resources.
(Portworx benchmark test for MongoDB, 2018. See
https://portworx.com/kubernetes-failover-mongodb/)

35%
Portworx delivered greater than 35%
better mixed read/write IOPS than native
Azure pvc_ even on write operations.

Kubernetes Storage Performance Comparison,

Volterra.io, Feb 2019

better IOPS
24
 About Portworx
Portworx is the Kubernetes storage platform enterprises rely on to manage mission critical
data services in containers. By enabling data availability, data security, backup and disaster
recovery for Kubernetes-based applications running on-prem or across clouds, Portworx has
helped dozens of Global 2000 companies such as Carrefour, Comcast, GE Digital, Lufthansa,
T-Mobile, and SAIC run containerized data services in production.

“Specifically designed for cloud native workloads and applications, the Portworx
platform shows unmatched flexibility and scalability when compared to traditional
storage solutions, leaving the end user the possibility to move applications and data
from on-prem to hybrid and multi cloud seamlessly.”

~ Enrico Signoretti, Senior Data Storage Analyst at GigaOm

Portworx Customers
Portworx is used in production more than any cloud native storage solution for containers,
and is trusted by many of the world’s most sophisticated IT organizations including:

25 | Portworx
Why Customers Choose
Portworx

“Portworx provides infrastructure-agnostic features — such as volume

persistence, high availability, data security and automation — that are
valuable to a business like GE Digital.”

“With Portworx, our containers have fewer moving parts, fewer

commands to understand, and fewer things to break.”

“We looked for a partner that would provide us a stable performing

environment for critical data on Kubernetes and Portworx checked all
those boxes.”

26
 Partner Certifications
Portworx is a high availability and disaster recovery partner for Microsoft SQL
Server 2017, and a certified technology for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes.

Portworx is a high availability and disaster recovery partner for SQL

Server 2017 on Docker.

Portworx Enterprise has achieved Red Hat certification for Red Hat
OpenShift Container Platform and is available in the Red Hat Container
Catalog.

Portworx is a Level 5 certified operator for OpenShift. Red Hat

OpenShift Certified Operators deliver enterprise applications with
consistent packaging, deployment and lifecycle management across
all OpenShift footprints.

Portworx is a Kubernetes certified service provider. Portworx solves

the challenges of running stateful services on Kubernetes— stuck
volumes, downtime, manual backups and migrations, lost data and
more— with cloud native storage and data management built from the
ground up for Kubernetes.

27 | Portworx
Ready to build the next generation
of enterprise applications on
Microsoft Azure?
To learn more and get started
with Portworx Enterprise on Microsoft Azure, please visit:

Portworx.com/Azure

“Platforms like Portworx offer a coherent ecosystem for automating data management

and protection of Kubernetes-based workloads, combining the flexibility of containers with

enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.”

Steven Hill, senior analyst at 451 Research.

28
Let’s work together

Request a demo and get your free trial for Portworx on Microsoft at:

portworx.com/Azure