DEVOPSdigest

Portworx announced Portworx Enterprise 2.1, an update to its cloud-native storage and data management platform with new features focused on security and disaster recovery.

Specifically, new role-based access controls come as part of PX-Security, enabling organizations to set access ownership and access controls on a per container data volume basis, integrated with their corporate authorization and authentication system.

Portworx is also introducing PX-DR, which enables disaster recovery with zero data loss, known as RPO zero, between data centers located in a single metropolitan area.

Enterprises of all sizes and industries are leveraging cloud-native technologies like containers and Kubernetes to transform business. However, more than 57% of enterprises list security as the top barrier limiting container adoption, with over 20% listing disaster recovery as the top barrier. By solving these top barriers, Portworx provides enterprises with confidence that their applications can safely and securely run on the Kubernetes platform, and recover if a failover occurs.

"Adoption of container technologies is rapidly increasing in the enterprise, with nearly half of businesses already running apps on Kubernetes in production. But Kubernetes alone is not able to meet the complex requirements that today's businesses face," said Murli Thirumale, co-founder and CEO of Portworx. "Unless Kubernetes can be augmented to meet the requirements of mission critical enterprise applications — data security, data protection, backup and recovery, SLA management, and compliance — its power to drive digital transformation will be incomplete. Portworx is solving the hard, non-negotiable business requirements for running data services in containers with the aim of enabling complete digital transformation."

PX-Security: Traditional authentication systems are typically implemented via integration with enterprise-standard systems like Active Directory or LDAP. Kubernetes does not currently enable organizations to authorize and authenticate access to data using these tools. This means businesses could potentially have an authorized Kubernetes user who is able to access a data volume that may not be appropriate for their role or job. Portworx's new role-based security features extends the Portworx Enterprise platform for news classes of applications with sensitive data. The core feature of PX-Security was previously container-granular bring-your-own-key encryption. Now, PX-Security is extended to include container-granular role-based authentication, authorization, and ownership in addition to encryption. Organizations can now set access controls on a per container data volume basis, integrated with their corporate authorization and authentication system.

PX-DR: No truly mission critical application can run in Kubernetes without a strong disaster recovery plan. With Portworx Enterprise 2.1, Portworx takes the industry's first step towards Kubernetes-native disaster recovery by introducing PX-DR. PX-DR enables two additional levels of data protection beyond single-data center and multi-availability zone HA that is available today. First, disaster recovery with zero data loss between data centers located in a single metropolitan area. Most cloud providers and colocation facilities popular with enterprises have data centers located in major metropolitan areas, providing a wide range of data centers that can serve as a Kubernetes DR site. Examples include, but are not limited to, Azure US East to AWS US East; Azure Germany Central to AWS Europe Frankfurt; Google Cloud asia-east2 to Azure East Asia; any AWS data center to Direct Connected Colo facility.

Second, Portworx Enterprise also now provides an additional level of disaster recovery for geographically dispersed data centers with continuous incremental backups. Taken together, Portworx Enterprise now provides three levels of HA and data protection for mission critical apps: within a single data center or multi-availability zones; across data centers or clouds within a metropolitan area; and across data centers spanning the world.

The new features are available now.