Software container company Portworx Inc. is teaming up with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. on a new approach to deploying and scaling containerized workloads faster.

Portworx said in its pitch Thursday that the rise of on-demand applications such as ride-hailing apps is fueling a demand for cloud-native and container-based frameworks that can scale to meet growing performance requirements. Software containers are a tool used by developers that allows them to build applications capable of running on any platform, regardless of the underlying hardware or software.

Portworx, which sells a persistent storage system for containers, says it’s providing this framework by integrating its product with HPE’s Synergy platform, which combines computing, storage and networking into a “composable” unit. The new configuration uses Portworx’s storage platform alongside Kubernetes as the container orchestration tool.

The new “reference configuration,” as Portworx calls it, also highlights how on-demand apps are helping to accelerate a transition from “stateless” containers where data is destroyed when each instance is shut down, to “stateful” containers that can retain this data and are therefore better suited to production.

“Running enterprise container workloads at scale requires compute and storage that are highly flexible, scalable and available,” said McLeod Glass, HPE’s vice president of production management.

That explains the need to combine Portworx’s cloud native storage system with HPE’s Synergy platform, so as to scale computing services on Kubernetes clusters, the companies said. The reference configuration therefore helps to simplify the delivery of stateful container services, “striking an important balance for enterprise IT between automation and control,” Portworx Chief Executive Murli Thirumale said in a statement.

HPE’s Synergy platform helps automate hardware provisioning, while Portworx’s PX enterprise storage layers for stateful workloads is used to automate application management. Here’s a quick diagram that shows how it all ties together:

Portworx said this is important because DevOps teams need greater automation to ensure their on-demand applications deliver the performance expected of them. With the new configuration, it’s possible to run container applications and back-end databases on either bare metal servers, without software installed, or virtual machines based on Synergy, the company said.

In addition, the reference configuration also simplifies the integration of Kubernetes, and makes it easier to fire up instances on demand, eliminating the need for third-party service providers, HPE said.

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