Pure Storage Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced a three-year strategic investment to help enterprises more easily manage their cloud-based software container environments.

A growing number of companies are adopting software containers in their application projects. Many of those organizations are deploying their containerized workloads on AWS’ Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. Amazon EKS is a managed version of Kubernetes that automates many of the manual tasks normally involved in using the software. 

The strategic investment announced by Pure Storage and AWS today focuses on helping enterprises use the former company’s Portworx software platform to more easily manage applications running on Amazon EKS. As part of the investment, the companies plan to launch “solution development and enablement programs.” Pure Storage is also making a new data protection tool available for AWS customers in early access.

Portworx is a software platform that Pure Storage obtained through its 2020 acquisition of a startup of the same name. The challenge the platform addresses is that Kubernetes provides a more limited set of data management features than many enterprise applications require. Portworx adds in the necessary features to make it easier for companies to manage the information used by their workloads.

With Portworx, a company can create a pool of storage capacity that scales automatically in accordance with the requirements of an application. To reduce the risk of outages, the platform makes it possible to spread records across multiple cloud data centers. Keeping information in multiple data centers ensures that important business records remain available even if one of the facilities experiences a technical issue.

For situations where some of a company’s business information is lost in an outage, Pure Storage has built a tool called Portworx PX-Backup. The company said today that the tool is available for AWS customers in early access. According to Pure Storage, Portworx PX-Backup enables customers to back up applications’ data and restore it in the event of an outage with a few clicks.

The strategic investment with AWS represents a notable win for Pure Storage. 

NYSE-traded Pure Storage is a major provider of flash storage hardware for data centers. Given the broad enterprise adoption of cloud computing, many of Pure Storage’s customers are likely running workloads on AWS. The collaboration with AWS to ease the management of off-premises Kubernetes workloads will enable Pure Storage to support its customers’ cloud initiatives in more ways. 

“Portworx and Amazon EKS deliver a truly better together solution that tackles some of the biggest challenges organizations face when bringing Kubernetes applications to enterprise scale,” said Murli Thirumale, vice president and general manager of Pure Storage’s Cloud Native Business Unit. 

Pure Storage has already been working with AWS in a number of other areas. The companies enable joint customers to use Portworx, as well as Pure Storage’s flash storage systems, together with the AWS Outposts service. AWS Outposts enable companies to deploy infrastructure and services from the Amazon.com Inc. unit’s cloud platform in their on-premises data centers.

On the software side, Pure Storage has made its Pure Cloud Block Store and Purity CloudSnap services available on AWS. The former offering helps companies manage their data storage environments. Purity CloudSnap, meanwhile, makes it possible to keep backup copies of business information in the cloud.

The strategic investment with AWS underscores the key role of software and cloud services in Pure Storage’s growth strategy. The company disclosed last April that the bulk of its product development efforts now focus on software. Other players in the data center infrastructure market, such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., are also making cloud services a bigger focus of their growth efforts.

Photo: Pure Storage