Persistent containers from Portworx's PX-Enterprise package

Portworx's PX-Enterprise package is persistent storage for containers. The firm claims it can reduce costs by 70 per cent compared to so-called legacy storage products.

Startup Portworx says "containers are distributed and fast, while legacy storage is siloed and slow, and cannot be quickly provisioned or scaled to respond to changing container workloads."

Nor does it have per-container storage management.

PX-Enterprise has also release a free PX-Developer product for the DevOps community. The paid-for product: ensures data persistence across nodes; enables storage policies such as class of service, IOPS and availability to be set at a container level; and provides container-granular snapshots and replication. Storage can be provisioned in seconds and is claimed to run at bare metal speeds.

It's also said to be multi-cloud-ready. The product turns commodity x86 hardware into a converged storage node that can be scaled across a cluster of nodes and automatically provisioned with any Docker-ready scheduler.

The feature list looks like this:

• Scale-out block storage deployed as a container
• Container-granular controls for storage capacity, performance and availability
• Container-granular snapshots
• Replication for extra measure of redundancy
• Ability to deploy in the cloud, on-premises or both, thus preventing vendor lock-in
• RESTful API and a command-line interface for deployment and integration with containers
• Global file namespace
• Multi-cluster visibility for unified storage management
• Predictive capacity management with proactive alerts before storage capacity limit is reached

Adding persistent storage for containers is a trend with HPE on track, UK startup StorageOS active in the area, and Tintri saying it will do it. CTO Kieran Harty says containers are equivalent to lightweight and nimbler virtual machines. In principle Tintri's per-VM provisioning, management and analytics can be and will be we think) extended to the per-container sphere.

Portworx says it has usage in technical computing, databases (Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Hadoop, Spark), content management and video processing. PX-Enterprise will be available in late July and. Portworx will demo it at DockerCon 2016, (booth S36) in Seattle, Wash., June 19-21, 2016. ®