Category: Enterprise infrastructure

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105: Greybeards talk new datacenter architecture with Pradeep Sindhu, CEO & Co-founder, Fungible

Neither Ray nor Keith has met Pradeep before, but Ray was very interested in Fungible’s technology. Turns out Pradeep Sindhu, CEO and Co-founder, Fungible has had a long and varied career in the industry starting at Xerox Parc, then co-founding and becoming chief scientist at Juniper, and now reachitecting the data center with Fungible. Pradeep mentioned this at the end of the podcast, he has always been drawn to hard problems with the potential to open up immense possibilities. What he did at Juniper and what he is planning to accomplish with Fungible both fit that pattern.

Today, in a typical data center, we have servers, networking and storage equipment all connected through a fabric. But from Pradeep’s perspective none of it works well in support of data centric computing. What we have today is operating like changing a screw with a pliers. But if there existed some hardware that can execute data centric computing (or to follow the metaphor, a screw driver) well, the data center would operate much more efficiently, with more performance and better resource use.

Fungible was founded in 2015 with the idea that the industry is moving to a data centric computing paradigm and today’s data center is ill equipped to take IT there.

What is data centric computing

The IT industry has been moving to a new type of computing, that is focused on short bursts of CPU activity with relatively small packets of data coming off the network (from sensors/outside world, from storage, from other servers, etc.). Those workloads are often transient, short lived, are intended to be performed quickly and may not leave any persistent state.

We can see this in the emergence of micro-services architectures with Docker and k8s containers. But you don’t have to be using containers. It’s also present in machine learning where the update cycle of the neural network (with accelerators) takes lot’s of small bursts of computation while it consumes lots of small data items (pictures, text documents, ticker/status logs, etc. ).

Furthermore, the move to commodity hardware has taken the same x86/ARM core CPUs and used them to execute these small bursts of computation. And for some of these operations that may still make sense. But when the data center uses these same cores to perform data path packet processing. It bogs down the network. It consumes a lot of power, adds overhead (higher latencies), leads to packet loss, injects network jitter and a host of other problems.

So, in order to get the data packets to where they need to be with out those problems, networking endpoints need to be changed out to something designed to support data path critical workloads. Pradeep calls these data path critical work items “run to complete” code.

The critical question is what proportion of IT workloads are “data centric’ vs. not. While it might not be that high today, Pradeep and Fungible are betting that it’s going to be getting much higher over time. If we look at hyper-scalars today they are the forefront of this computing paradigm change and much of their workloads are moving to containerized execution.

The DPU enables data centric computing

Fungible plans to add a DPU that supports a power efficient, “run-to-complete” programming engine to the data center. By using DPUs, they can create a true fabric (using IPoE) that’s low latency, low jitter, lossless and provides full cross-sectional bandwidth.

The problem as Pradeep sees it is that the X86 and ARM cores are just not made to execute run-to-comple workloads well and this is required to provide a true fabric. Whereas Fungible has designed the DPU from the start to execute run-to-complete work.

Pradeep sees the data center of tomorrow utilizing JBoF(lash) & JBoD(isk) boxes with DPU(s) in front of them providing storage server services (block, file and object), JBoGP(Us) or JBoFP(GAs) boxes with DPU(s) in front of them providing accelerator/graphics server services, and compute boxes with DPU(s) and x86/ARM cores with DRAM-Optane PMEM in them providing CPU server and client services. All the DPUs together in a cluster would in total provide true fabric services.

Essentially, the DPUs would take over all data path operations and the storage, GPUS, CPUs would handle everything else. In effect, segregating data path and control path services in the data center.

Greenfield, brownfield or both

Keith and I both assumed this would be great for a green field deployments. But,. Pradeep said it’s designed to be incrementally added to servers, JBoFs, JBoDs, JBoGs/JBoFPs and start providing data path services within current data center fabric environments. Even as the rest of the data center remain unchanged.

At some point we talked about the programming model of the DPU. The DPU offers a bring your own Linux OS that can be programmed in any language you choose. But the critical, data-path functionalityi is coded in “C” to run as fast and as efficiently as possible.

Fungible has designed this hardware themselves. We didn’t get to talk about how they plan to market their product to the data center.

Pradeep also said to stay-tuned, and they were just about to announce their first product offering based on the DPU.

The podcast ran ~38 minutes. Pradeep, given his education and experience, is a very knowledgeable individual about the data center environment today. He’s certainly one of the most interesting IT tecnologist we have talked with in a while on the GreyBeards podcast. To say what Fungible is trying to do is aggressive and bold is an understatement. But Pradeep feels this is the only way forward to liberate the data center from its data path chains today. Both Keith and I thought we needed at least another hour or so to truly understand what they are doing and where they are going with it. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Pradeep Sindhu, CEO and Co-Founder, Fungible

Pradeep Sindhu is CEO and Co-Founder of Fungible, a Santa Clara-based startup providing at-scale, next-generation solutions for the data center, cloud and IT industries. He has been at the forefront of the network and processing industry for over three decades.

As the co-founder and CTO of Juniper Networks, he played a central role in the architecture, design and development of Juniper’s M40 router – the M series was the first of its kind, offering the industry true decoupling of the control plane and the forwarding plane.

Prior to Juniper, he was a Principal Scientist and Distinguished Engineer at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) pushing the envelope on what silicon could do for networking and processing.

He is passionate about new ways to support our growing data-centric world with the right combination of hardware and software to build the infrastructure our future needs.

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104: GreyBeards talk new cloud defined (shared) storage with Siamak Nazari, CEO Nebulon

Ray has known Siamak Nazari (@NebulonInc), CEO Nebulon for three companies now but has rarely had a one (two) on one discussion with him. With Nebulon just emerging from stealth (a gutsy move during the pandemic), the GreyBeards felt it was a good time to get Siamak on the show to tell us what he’s been up to. Turns out he and Nebulon decided it was time to completely rethink/rearchitect shared storage for the new data center.

At his prior company, Siamak spent a lot of time with many customers discussing the problems they had dealing with the complexity of managing, provisioning and maintaining multiple shared storage arrays. Somewhere in all those discussions Siamak saw this as a problem that needed a radical solution. If we could just redo shared storage from the ground up, there might be a solution to all these problems.

Redefining shared storage

Nebulon’s new approach to shared storage starts with an SPU card which replaces SAS RAID cards in a server. But instead of creating SAS RAID groups, the SPU creates a shareable, enterprise class, pool of storage across a throng of servers.

They call a collection of servers with SPUs, Cloud Defined Storage (CDS) and it creates a Nebulon nPod. An nPod essentially consists of multiple servers with SPU cards, with or without attached SSD storage, that are provisioned, managed and monitored via the cloud. Nebulon nPod servers are elements or nodes of a shared storage pool across all interconnected SPU servers in a data center.

In an SPU server with local (SAS, SATA, NVMe) SSD storage, the SPU creates an erasure coded pool of storage which can be used to serve (SAS) LUNs to this or any other SPU attached server in the nPod. In a SPU server without local SSD storage, the SPU provides access to any other SPU server shared storage in the nPod. Nebulon nPods only works with flash storage, it doesn’t support spinning media.

The SPU can supply boot storage for its server. There’s no need to have the CPU running OS code to use nPod shared storage. Yes, the SPU needs power and an active PCIe bus to work, but the functionality of an SPU doesn’t require an operational OS to work. The SPU provides a SAS LUN interface to server CPUs.

Each SPU has dual port access to an inter-cluster (25GbE) interconnect that connects all SPUs to the nPod. The nPod inter-cluster protocol is proprietary but takes advantage of standard TCP/IP services across the network with standard 25GbE switching.

The SPU firmware insures that it stays connected as long as power is available to the server. Customers can have more than one SPU in a server but these would be used for more IO performance. Each SPU also has 32GB of NVRAM for caching purposes and it’s also used for power fail fault tolerance.

In the unlikely case that the server and SPU are completely down (e.g. power outage), clients can still access that SPUs data storage, if it was mirrored (see below). When the SPU server comes back up, it will be resynched with any data that had been changed.

Other Nebulon storage features

Nebulon supports data-at-rest encryption, compression and deduplication for customer data. That way customer data is never in plain text as it travels across the nPod or even within the server from the SPU to SSD storage. Also any customer data written to an nPod can be optionally mirrored and as noted above, is protected via erasure coding.

The SPU also supports snapshotting of customer LUN data. So clients can take copies of LUNs and use these for backups, test, dev, etc. SPUs also support asynchronous or synchronous replication between nPods. For synchronous replication and mirrored data, the originating host only sees the IO complete after the data has been received at the target SPU or nPod.

Metadata for the nPod that defines LUN configurations and which server has LUN data is kept across the cluster in each SPU. But metadata on the location of user data within a server is only kept in that server’s SPU.

We asked Siamak whether nPods support SCM (storage class memory). He said not yet, but they’re looking at SCM NVMe storage for use as a potential metadata and data cache for SPUs.

Nebulon Application Centric storage

All the above storage features are present in most enterprise class storage systems. But what sets Nebulon apart from all other shared storage arrays is that their control plane is entirely in the cloud. That is customers point their browser to Nebulon’s control plane and use it to configure, provision and manage the nPod storage pool. Nebulon supports application templates that can be used to configure nPod storage to support standardized applications, such as VMware VMs, MongoDB, persistent storage for K8S containers, bare metal Linux apps, etc.

With the nPod’s control plane in the cloud it makes provisioning, managing and monitoring storage services much more agile. Nebulon can literally roll out new control plane updatesy to their install base on an almost daily basis. Just like any other cloud based or SAAS application. Customers receive the updated nPod control plane functionality by simply refreshing their browser page.

Nebulon’s GoToMarket

Near the end of our podcast, we asked Siamak about how Nebulon was going to access the market. Nebulon’s goto market is to use server OEMs. That is, they have signed agreements with two (and working on a third) server vendors to sell SPU cards with Nebulon control plane access.

During server purchases, customers configure their servers but now along with SAS RAID card options they will now see an Nebulon SPU option. OEM server vendors will bundle SPU hardware and Nebulon control plane access along with all other server components such as CPU’s, SSDs, NICs, etc, This way, the customer will receive a pre-installed SPU card in their server and will be ready to configure nPod LUNs as soon as the server powers on in their network.

Nebulon will go GA in the 3rd quarter.

The podcast ran ~43 minutes. Siamak has always been a pleasure to talk with and is very knowledgeable about the problems customers have in today’s data center environments. Nebulon has given him and his team the way to rethink storage and address these serious issues. Matt and I had a good time talking with Siamak. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Siamak Nazari, CEO Nebulon

Siamak Nazari is the CEO and Co-founder of Nebulon. Siamak has over 25 years of experience working on distributed and highly available systems.

In his position as HPE Fellow and VP, he was responsible for setting technical direction for HPE 3PAR and its portfolio of software and hardware. He worked on HPE 3PAR technology from 2000 to 2018, responsible for designing and implementing distributed memory management and the high availability features of the system.

Prior to joining 3PAR, Siamak was the technical lead for distributed highly available Proxy Filesystem (pxfs) of Sun Cluster 3.0.

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0102 GreyBeards talk big memory data with Charles Fan, CEO & Co-founder, MemVerge

It’s been a couple of months since we last talked with a startup, so the GreyBeards thought it was time. We reached out to Charles Fan (@CharlesFan14), CEO and Co-Founder of MemVerge to find out about their big memory solution or as Charles likes to call it, “software defined (big) memory”. Although neither Matt or I had ever talked with Charles before, he’s been just about everywhere in the storage industry throughout his career.

If you have been following my RayOnStorage blog you will have seen a post (Need memory, Intel’s Optane DC PM to the rescue) last year on Intel’s new Persistent Memory solutions using 3D XPoint, called Optane DC PM (data center, persistent memory) . At the announcement Intel made available a couple of ways customers could use Optane DC PM (PMem).

Optane DC PM primer

Native Optane DC PM access modes include:

  • A Memory Mode, which has Pmem emulating a large volatile memory space and uses a defined ratio of DRAM to PMem as a cache to access the Optane DC PM memory behind it.
  • An Application Direct (AppDirect) Mode which supports two sub-modes: a storage device mode that uses Pmem to emulate a persistent, 4KB block storage device; and a byte addressable, persistent memory address space mode that uses Pmem to emulate a large, non-volatile memory space . AppDirect memory content persists across boots, power failures and other system crashes.

Native PMem modes are selectected in the BIOS and are deployed at Boot time. Optane DC PM on a server can be split up into any of the three modes. And currently with Optane DC PM (Gen 1), a single server can have up to 6TB of DC PM which will go up to 8TB with Optane DC PM Gen 2 coming out later this year.

MemVerge Memory Machine

MemVerge has written a “software defined memory” service called the Memory Machine, that sits above the Intel Optane DC PM in server(s) and provides application access AND data services for PMem. .

Charles likens their Memory Machine to what VMware did for CPU cores, ie. they provide memory virtualization. This, Charles believes will bring on the age of Big Memory applications. He feels that PMem, with Memory Machine on top of it, will eliminate the need for high performance, tier 0 storage. Tier 0 storage is ~$10B market today, which he sees shifting from networked storage to PMem solutions. 

Memory Machine Data Services

One of the data services that the Memory Machine offers is a Pmem snapshot service. PMem thick or thin snapshots can be taken any (infinite) number of times (for thick snapshots storage space availability may limit their number) and can be taken up to once per minute. PMem thin snapshots take little time to accomplish and are very PMem space efficient but thick snapshots are a PMem to PMem copy of data, which will take longer to accomplish and will take double the memory of the original PMem being snapshot.

One significant use case for Pmem snapshots is for checkpoint crash recovery. Charles mentioned many securities and financial analysis firms use KDB as streaming data base service to monitor/analyze market activity and provide automated trading and other market services. These firms are always trying to gain an advantage through speed and reduced latency and as a result have moved their time sensitive processing to use in memory data structures/databases.

However, because checkpointing for crash recovery takes time, they usually checkpoint in memory databases only once a day (after market close) and maintain a log of database transactions on SSD. If there’s a system crash, they reload the last checkpoint and re-play all the transaction logs since that checkpoint to bring their in memory database back to the point of crash. Due to the number of transactions these firms do, this sort of crash recoverys can take hours.

With Memory Machine, these customers can take in memory checkpoints every minute and in the event of a crash, only have to re-play a minutes worth of transaction logs which could be done in no time to get back up

Other environments do similar checkpoint crash recoveries all of which could also take advantage of PMem snapshots to take more frequent checkpoints. Charles mentioned Rendering farms on the podcast but long scientific simulations (HPC) and others use checkpoints for crash recovery.

Another data (or application) service offered by Memory Machine is application cloning. Most in memory applications are single threaded. meaning they can only take advantage of a single CPU core (thread). In order to speed up processing, customers must shard (split up) or copy their database and application onto other servers/CPU/cores to provide more processing power. Memory Machine can use its thick or thin snapshots to clone applications in seconds.

Charles also mentioned that Memory Machine offers PMem dynamic reconfiguration. That is instead of having to make BIOS changes and re-boot server(s) to re-allocate PMem across different applications, Memory Machine is allocated 100% of the PMem at boot time but then, on demand, anytime its operating, operators using MemVerge’s GUI/CLI can carve Pmem up into any number of application memory spaces. That is as application demand for in memory data changes, operations can use the Memory Machine to re-allocate PMem to keep up.

Memory Machine also supports PMem clustering or scaling across servers. With the current 6TB (and soon 8TB) per server PMem limit, some customer applications still run out of memory. Memory Machine is able to cluster or aggregate PMem across up to 32 servers to support a single larger, PMem address space of 192TB (Gen 1) or 256TB (Gen 2) DC PM. The Memory Machine uses an RDMA (RoCE Ethernet or InfiniBand) cluster interconnect which adds ~1 microsecond of overhead to access PMem in another server. This comes with PMem automatic data tiering using DRAM, local (on the server) PMem and remote (across cluster interconnect) PMem.

Charles mentioned another data service provided by Memory Machine is (Synch or Asynch) replication. One use case for replication is to create a Pub-Sub service for market data.

Charles believes that in memory databases and data processing workloads are just starting to become popular these days. Besides KDB and rendering, other data processing such as AI training/inferencing, Reddis applications, and other database systems are able to take advantage of in memory, large data structures to speed up their data processing

MemVerge’s EAP (early access program) opened up recently (5/19/2020). Charles suggested anyone using large, in memory data processing, take a look at what the Memory Machine can do and contact them to sign up.

The podcast runs ~45 minutes. Charles was very articulate as well as knowledgeable about the technology and its applications. He was great to talk tech with. Matt and I had a fun time talking Optane DC PM and Memory Machine functionality/applications with him. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Charles Fan, CEO & Co-founder, MemVerge

Charles Fan is co-founder and CEO of MemVerge. Prior to MemVerge, Charles was a SVP/GM at VMware, founding the storage business unit that developed the Virtual SAN product.

Charles also worked at EMC and was the founder of the EMC China R&D Center. Charles joined EMC via the acquisition of Rainfinity, where he was a co-founder and CTO.

Charles received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union.

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0100: GreyBeards talk with Colin Gallagher, VP Dig. Infra. Prod. Mkt. @ Hitachi Vantara

Sponsored By:

We have known Colin Gallagher (@worldc3), VP, Digital Infrastructure Product Marketing at Hitachi Vantara, for a long time and he has always been an all around smart storage guy. Colin’s team at Hitachi Vantara are bringing out a brand new, midrange storage system and we thought it would be a good time to catch up with him and learn about it.

The new Hitachi Vantara VSP E990 Storage System is an all NVMe SSD array for medium sized enterprises that need predictable, high IOPS-low latency performance with enterprise class functionality and world class reliability/availability. We asked Colin why they needed all NVMe levels of performance. Colin replied that many of these data centers are starting to use advanced HPC, AI, and data analytics applications together with their standard Oracle, SAP and Microsoft solutions. These combined workloads have an acute need for predictable, high end performance and enterprise class functionality in order to work well.

The VSP E99O comes from a long heritage of enterprise storage at Hitachi, most recently embodied in the Hitachi VSP 5000. In fact, the VSP E990 uses the same storage OS as the VSP 5000, with changes made to streamline it for use with higher performing, all NVMe storage on a dual controller architecture.

This means all the advanced storage functionality of the high end enterprise VSP 5000 are available on the VSP E990 midrange system, minus some items not pertinent to midrange such as mainframe attach.

Many of the software changes involved cache and cache management. In the VSP E990, cache is now automatically shared and distributed across controllers reducing the performance impact of mirroring. Further, Hitachi has added more cores and higher performing processors as well. As a result, the VSP E990 all NVMe array can provide up to 5.8M IOPS and a best in any networked storage system, IO response time as low as 64 µsec. Colin also mentioned that they have reduced flash drive rebuild times by 80%.

The VSP E990 comes in a 4U base configuration and can offer from ~6TB to up to over 6PB of virtual capacity with drive expansion. In 8U plus controller (on the audio, it was incorrectly stated as 6U, The Eds.), the VSP E990 provides slots for up to 96 NVMe SSDs. Just like all VSP storage, the VSP E990 also offers the Hitachi 100% Data Availability Guarantee, the world’s oldest. Further, the VSP E990 supports 6-9s (99.9999%) reliability.

In addition the VSP E990 also supports Hitachi Adaptive Data Reduction, which compresses and deduplicates data to increase virtual capacity and reduce physical footprint. In the VSP E990, Adaptive Data Reduction uses AI to determine the best time to deduplicate data while at the same time optimizing host IO performance and effective storage capacity.

Hitachi Ops Center

During the last year or so Hitachi Vantara introduced its new Hitachi Ops Center solution to better administer and manage storage and other digital infrastructure. Ops Center now comes with 4 components: Administrator, Protector (copy data management), Automator and Analyzer.

  • Administrator supplies an element manager for VSP, other storage, and digital infrastructure in the data center.
  • Protector provides enterprise class, copy data management to protect, migrate, and archive VSP data storage.
  • Analyzer supports AI analysis of the data center’s storage operations to monitor SLAs, troubleshoot shoot problems, and improve storage performance as well as 3rd party compute, network and storage.
  • Automator supplies a series of templates and services to automate mundane, manual storage and other digital infrastructure tasks required to configure, operate and manage these systems in the data center. Automator provides a number of templates which customers can tailor to automate infrastructure operations such as provisioning an ESXi data store. The templates together with Automator services automatically carry out all the OS, fabric and storage/digital infrastructure tasks and activities required to perform these functions.

Hitachi EverFlex consumption models

Hitachi Vantara is also introducing EverFlex, a new series of consumption models, that any customer can use to provide more financial flexibility in their data center digital infrastructure acquisitions, deployments, and management.

EverFlex offers customers the option to purchase, lease or buy on a pay-as-you-go, cloud-like basis any Hitachi Vantara storage or digital infrastructure. Colin mentioned there were two ways that pay-as-you-go can operate,

  1. Customers pay on pure capacity over time basis. Here the customer would contract for a certain capacity and Hitachi Vantara would install storage/digital infrastructure capacity and would bill them monthly for it.
  2. Customers pay on an SLA over time basis. Here they would contract for a specific SLA, such as IOPS or other performance characteristic and Hitachi Vantara would install and maintain any storage/digital infrastructure to meet that SLA and bill them monthly for it.

Colin said that all Hitachi, world-class services are also now available to be purchased under EverFlex.

The podcast ran ~24 minutes. Colin has always been easy to talk with and very knowledgeable about storage. We were very impressed with the performance and innovation in the VSP E990 as well as Ops Center and EverFlex. Keith and I had fun discussing these solutions with Colin. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Colin Gallagher, VP Digital Infrastructure Product Marketing at Hitachi Vantara

Colin is Vice President for Digital Infrastructure Product Marketing at Hitachi Vantara where he leads product marketing for storage systems, storage software, and converged/hyper-converged solutions.

Over his 25-year career he has lead marketing and product management team teams at several major storage companies. Colin has a passion for telling compelling stories about technical products that help customers solve both business and personal pain – and he enjoys the challenge of telling them in creative ways.

He holds a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and an MBA from Northeastern University. Colin tries to put as many miles on his bike as possible, “hangs out” on twitter as @worldc3, and (unlike the GreyBeards) is team Oxford comma.

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90: GreyBeards talk K8s containers storage with Michael Ferranti, VP Product Marketing, Portworx

At VMworld2019 USA there was a lot of talk about integrating Kubernetes (K8s) into vSphere’s execution stack and operational model. We had heard that Portworx was a leader in K8s storage services or persistent volume support and thought it might be instructive to hear from Michael Ferranti (@ferrantiM), VP of Product Marketing at Portworx about just what they do for K8s container apps and their need for state information.

Early on Michael worked for RackSpace in their SaaS team and over time saw how developers and system engineers just loved container apps. But they had great difficulty using them for mission critical applications and containers of the time had a complete lack of support for storage. Michael joined Portworx to help address these and other limitations in using containers for mission critical workloads.

Portworx is essentially a SAN, specifically designed for containers. It’s a software defined storage system that creates a cluster of storage nodes across K8s clusters and provides standard storage services on a container level granularity.

As a software defined storage system, Portworx is right in the middle of the data path, storage they must provide high availability, RAID protection and other standard storage system capabilities. But we talked only a little about basic storage functionality on the podcast.

Portworx was designed from the start to work for containers, so it can easily handle provisioning and de-provisioning, 100s to 1000s of volumes without breaking a sweat. Not many storage systems, software defined or not, can handle this level of operations and not impact storage services.

Portworx supports both synchronous and asynchronous (snapshot based) replication solutions. As all synchronous replication, system write performance is dependent on how far apart the storage nodes are, but it can provide RPO=0 (recovery point objective) for mission critical container applications.

Portworx takes this another step beyond just data replication. They also replicate container configuration (YAML) files. We’re no experts but YAML files contain an encapsulation of everything needed to understand how to run containers and container apps in a K8s cluster. When one combines replicated container YAML files, replicated persistent volume data AND an appropriate external registry, one can start running your mission critical container apps at a disaster site in minutes.

Their asynchronous replication for container data and configuration files, uses Portworx snapshots , which are sent to an alternate site. But they also support asynch replication to any S3 compatible storage via CloudSnap.

Portworx also supports KubeMotion, which replicates/copies name spaces, container app volume data and container configuration YAML files from one K8s cluster to another. This way customers can move their K8s namespaces and container apps to any other Portworx K8s cluster site. This works across on prem K8s clusters, cloud K8s clusters, between public cloud provider K8s clusters s or between on prem and cloud K8s clusters.

Michael also mentioned that data at rest encryption, for Portworx, is merely a tick box on a storage class specification in the container’s YAML file. They make use use of KMIP services to provide customer generated keys for encryption.

This is all offered as part of their Data Security/Disaster Recovery (DSDR) service. that supports any K8s cluster service whether they be AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenShift, bare metal, or VMware vSphere running K8s VMs.

Like any software defined storage system, customers needing more performance can add nodes to the Portworx (and K8s) cluster or more/faster storage to speed up IO

It appears they have most if not all the standard storage system capabilities covered but their main differentiator, besides container app DR, is that they support volumes on a container by container basis. Unlike other storage systems that tend to use a VM or higher level of granularity to contain container state information, with Portworx, each persistent volume in use by a container is mapped to a provisioned volume.

Michael said their focus from the start was to provide high performing, resilient and secure storage for container apps. They ended up with a K8s native storage and backup/DR solution to support mission critical container apps running at scale. Licensing for Portworx is on a per host (K8s node basis).

The podcast ran long, ~48 minutes. Michael was easy to talk with, knew K8s and their technology/market very well. Matt and I had a good time discussing K8s and Portworx’s unique features made for K8s container apps. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Michael Ferranti, VP of Product Marketing, Portworx

Michael (@ferrantiM) is VP of Product Marketing at Portworx, where he is responsible for communicating the value of containerization and digital transformation to global architects and CIOs.

Prior to joining Portworx, Michael was VP of Marketing at ClusterHQ, an early leader in the container storage market and spent five years at Rackspace in a variety of product and marketing roles