DockerCon 2015 - Portworx, a Silicon Valley startup creating the next-generation storage software for hosting stateful applications in Linux containers, today emerged from stealth mode, announcing PWX Converged Infrastructure for Containers. Portworx PWX provides elastic scale-out block storage natively to Docker containers, allowing Dockerized applications to execute directly on the storage infrastructure and containers to be persisted and scheduled fluidly across machines and clouds.

"Enterprise applications are typically stateful, and having a container-aware infrastructure for these applications is key for us," said Justin Fitzhugh, former CIO of Jive Software and current vice president of technical operations at Instart Logic. "Providing a stateful, scalable, container-tuned infrastructure that complements containerized applications is a key to rapid deployment of containers in the enterprise world. Portworx represents a next generation of technology specifically focused on accelerating deployment of containers in production."

Portworx PWX enables the rapid deployment of stateful, distributed applications into production. With PWX, applications can be scaled rapidly without IT intervention, which enables businesses to meet the high growth demands of today's markets.

The venture funding community has responded to Portworx' model with an initial funding round of $8.5 million led by the Mayfield Fund.

"The container wave is the latest example of a disruptive paradigm that will create a new stack of platform companies, much like virtualization did," said Navin Chaddha, Mayfield managing director and Portworx board member. "We are champions of the Portworx team and believe their unique software-defined storage solution has the potential to replace traditional SAN and NAS architectures."

Stateful Applications Drive New Container-Aware Storage In the enterprise, containers bring new requirements for data persistence and management. A container's data is not inherently portable or persistent across multiple nodes, storage performance is not tuned for containers, and storage features such as snapshots and replication are not container-specific but rather LUN-generic.

Portworx PWX provides:

• Container-Aware storage, which enables data persistence across nodes, container-level snapshots, and storage policies at container granularity.
• Self-Service IT through Software Defined Storage.
• Converged Storage, which ensures that containers run on storage nodes to maximize I/O performance.
• An Elastic Storage Orchestrator, which auto scales block storage to meet application needs and moves underlying storage blocks across nodes to optimize performance and ensure high availability.
  

With Portworx PWX, IT and developers can provision storage to containers in an automated fashion that is optimized for Docker's platform. This eliminates infrastructure tweaking and custom script-writing, which delay production deployment and scaling.

"Containerization is demonstrating its benefits of agility, light-weight deployment and application portability in many applications. Docker has been at the center of driving container adoption, both directly and with the help of ecosystem partners like Portworx," said Nick Stinemates, head of business development and technical alliances at Docker. "Portworx' multi-host storage provisioning solution, in combination with Docker's volume solution, enables persistent data storage across multiple Docker hosts."

Storage Built From the Ground Up For Containers "Both stateless and stateful applications can benefit from containerization. Our goal was to build storage infrastructure for Docker containers from the ground up with a keen focus on the new requirements that containers and service-oriented architectures create," said Murli Thirumale, CEO of Portworx. "Building storage with container-level granularity ensures storage policies can be applied at the container level, enabling greater agility, application state consistency, high availability, rolling upgrades and high performance. In getting to this point, we had to break a few cherished notions about storage and traditional architectures."

With Portworx, enterprises can deploy stateful Dockerized applications in production.

Availability The Portworx PWX Developer Preview is available August 2015. For more information, pricing or a demo, contact Portworx at info@portworx.com.