Portworx improves stateful application backups for Kubernetes

Portworx by Pure Storage has released a new data protection platform, PX-Backup 2.1.

Portworx has also released survey data assessing end-user perspectives on running stateful applications on Kubernetes.

Pure Storage says the new improvements to PX-Backup help enterprises with comprehensive data protection, multi-cloud mobility, and improved compliance support for applications running on Kubernetes, whether on premises or in the cloud.

Some new enhancements to the platform include:

• Application portability between clouds: PX-Backup delivers application portability between any cloud or on-premises data center. With the latest version, customers can back up Kubernetes applications running in one cloud or data center and restore them in any other.  
• Improved compliance via 3-2-1 backup rule support for any storage: With this release, PX-Backup can now offload backups from CSI snapshots to object storage. Enterprises running Kubernetes apps on Portworx PX-Store, any CSI compliant storage service, or cloud-based storage can now use PX-Backup to maintain three copies of data (production, snapshots, backup copy) across both disk and object storage. This provides flexibility to store data off site, fulfilling the requirements of a 3-2-1 based backup program.  
• Expanded recovery with support for file shares: In addition to existing capabilities to back up block-based workloads, enterprises can now back up and recover applications running on read-write-many (RWX) persistent volumes provisioned as file shares from FlashBlade, Portworx proxy volumes, or any NFS server. 

According to an end-user survey of 500 IT professionals in the U.S. and U.K., over half of respondents cited increasing agility (58%) and resilience (52%) as the most significant drivers behind decisions to build and deploy stateful applications Kubernetes.

More than half of IT professionals surveyed agreed that running stateful apps on Kubernetes allows them to develop and scale apps faster, while allowing developers to be more efficient. Backup and restore (55%), data mobility and capacity management (49%), and high availability (48%) were identified as the most critical requirements for stateful apps running on Kubernetes.

Twenty-nine percent of IT professionals say that data mobility is the requirement they struggle the most to achieve when running stateful apps on Kubernetes, while just under half say data protection is the biggest operational challenge.

"The latest survey findings underscore the urgency of securing mission-critical Kubernetes applications with a comprehensive data protection and compliance strategy," says Pure Storage VP and general manager, Cloud-Native Business Unit, Murli Thirumale.

"With the latest PX-Backup enhancements, we're excited to offer global customers a vendor-agnostic solution to manage and secure their modern yet distributed Kubernetes infrastructure."

PX-Backup 2.1 will be available in November 2021.