Pure Storage Inc. said today it’s acquiring data services platform Portworx Inc. as it looks to expand into the growing market for cloud-native and Kubernetes-based storage services.

The company said it will pay about $370 million in cash to acquire Portworx in a deal that’s expected to be completed by the end of this month.

Pure Storage is a leading provider of data storage services, primarily known for its range of flash memory-based hardware and software products. Portworx, meanwhile, sells a Kubernetes Data Services Platform that provides persistent storage, high availability, data protection and security, and cloud mobility for software containers hosted in the cloud.

Containers are used to host the components of modern, agile software applications, and Kubernetes is open-source software that’s used to manage them.

Pure Storage said the deal, its largest-ever acquisition, will help accelerate its expansion into the fast-growing market for multicloud data services that support containers and Kubernetes.

“It’s going to match the existing legacy hardware and application environment to the new environment of containers,” Pure Storage Chairman and Chief Executive Charles Giancarlo (pictured) said in an exclusive interview (below) with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE. “We saw a philosophy within Portworx very similar to Pure of building cloud everywhere, and making it look the same whether it’s in a private data center or the public cloud. By bringing these two things together, we create a very consistent environment for customers.”

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of strategy at Pure Storage, said the company will form a new cloud native business unit around Portworx, led by that company’s CEO Murli Thirumale. That will enable Pure Storage to offer a comprehensive suite of data services that can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises, natively orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Pure Storage anticipates big demand for cloud-native storage services, citing research from Gartner Inc. that predicts 85% of global businesses will be running containers in production by 2025. The problem is that traditional storage platforms aren’t suitable for container-based applications, since they’re unable to provide the data resiliency, mobility, security and backup that these apps require.

“The challenge presented by containers is that it’s a technology originally designed for transient workloads to support DevOps workflows, not for enterprise applications that need long-term persistent storage,” analyst Steve McDowell of Moor Insights & Strategy told SiliconANGLE. “Marrying containers to storage remains cumbersome. There’s no enterprise storage vendor who delivers a seamless data services experience to the container market.”

Delivering that is important for Pure Storage, because its strategy is to bring a unified storage experience to workloads across on-premises, on-demand and public cloud, McDowell said. But the problem Pure Storage faces is that there’s only so much it can do in a cloud-native containerized environment. “CSI drivers can only take you so far, and this is a challenge that every storage OEM is facing,” McDowell said.

“Traditional storage solutions just weren’t set up for the pace of change with Kubernetes and containers,” Kixmoeller said. “The landscape is very fragmented.”

Portworx sells technology that can overcome many of these problems. Its software provides scalable storage for container workloads by transforming commodity server hardware into a converged storage node that can scale across clusters and automatically provision itself. That makes it easier for companies to provision the storage resources needed by their container apps. Users can manage their storage requirements on a per-container basis.

Michael Ferranti, vice president of product and market strategy at Portworx, told SiliconANGLE the company was one of the first to realize that storage requirements needed to change to be compatible with cloud-native, containerized apps, launching its product back in 2017. It has attracted a lot of funding for its efforts, most recently raising $27 million in a Series C round in early 2019 that brought its total amount raised to more than $55 million.

“Portworx focuses on bringing data services directly into the Kubernetes world,” McDowell said. “It’s an approach that’s resonating, as the company is demonstrating significant growth both in the cloud and on-prem markets.”

Kixmoeller said Portworx has distinguished itself as a leader in the container storage market. Moreover, he said that while Pure Storage has been transitioning toward selling all of its products as a service, Portworx has been there from the start. “We have an opportunity to build a broad platform,” he said.

Ferranti said the acquisition will benefit Portworx as it means getting access to a far bigger audience and greater resources to develop its product.

“It felt like both teams operated on the same wavelength,” Ferranti said. “Our founding team had a big vision for a modern storage and data services platform, so joining Pure Storage is a way for us to access a really large audience.”

McDowell believes the acquisition makes sense for both companies, and said it’s one that should start to bear fruit almost immediately. He said there’s almost no overlap between the companies’ products, which means that only a limited amount of integration is necessary.

“Competitively, this gives Pure a huge boost, broadening its market well beyond what it could service just with its arrays,” McDowell said. “Ultimately, it allows Pure to expand its enterprise footprint outside of its traditional hardware-based storage market. The future of IT is both software-defined and cloud-centric, so it’s critical that companies like Pure aggressively expand into these new areas if they’re to continue to grow.”

Pure Storage’s Giancarlo and Portworx CEO Murli Thirumale joined Vellante to talk more about the deal and plans for the companies going forward. Overall, said Thirumale, “this is the transformation of a data center from being very, very machine-centric … to being much more application-centric.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: SiliconANGLE