Container storage company Portworx Inc. today added a software development kit to its PX-Enterprise platform, giving enterprises a way to automate cloud-native storage and data management.

PX-Enterprise is Portworx’s cloud-native storage product for Kubernetes, which is the most widely used tool for managing software containers. Developers are increasingly using software containers to build their applications inside them because they offer a considerable advantage by abstracting away the underlying hardware and operating system so the apps they build can run anywhere.

PX-Enterprise provides scalable storage for container workloads by transforming commodity x86 server hardware into a converged storage node that can scale across clusters and automatically provision itself. The idea is that enterprises can use PX-Enterprise to rapidly provision storage for their container apps and easily manage their storage requirements on a per-container basis.

The new OpenStorage SDK in the PX-Enterprise 1.6 release enables developers to use application programming interfaces to “programmatically manage” the operations of containerized databases and other stateful services across multiple clouds. Essentially what that means is that developers can set up these backend services, which are used to provide the necessary data to power their applications, to automatically determine how storage is allocated, consumed, encrypted and backed up. In turn, this allows them to automatically respond to problems such as hardware, software and network failures that often occur with distributed applications.

Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., said the ability to manage storage services programmatically is an often overlooked but very welcome capability for those building containerized, next-generation enterprise applications.

“These applications always need some form of persistence, as business continues over days, weeks and years,” Mueller said. “So these storage options need to be available and it’s good to see vendors tackling the issue. Such offerings need to be software-defined too, which means they must be programmable in order to match the dynamic storage needs of next-gen apps.”

Portworx is also adding automated storage provisioning for private clouds running on vSphere and Pivotal Container Service for Kubernetes in the new release. That provides users of these services with better control on how their storage resources are allocated and managed. It means they can decouple compute from storage and scale up their workloads without worrying about data availability or migration, the company said.

Image: Portworx