Container technology has come a long way in such a short space of time, and has already done much to transform the deployment of applications. But storage has so far been unable to keep pace, because its difficult to scale up with increased workloads.

Enter data storage specialist Portworx Inc. with a new solution aimed at solving the container storage conundrum. The Redwood City, Calif.-based startup has just launched a new enterprise-class version of its storage solution for containers, following the release of a free developer version last year. Called PX-Enterprise, the new solution will allow IT teams to match the agility of container app developers and reduce costs compared to legacy solutions.

Portworx’s PX-Enterprise takes a fundamentally distributed approach, turning commodity x86 server hardware into a converged storage node that’s able to scale across clusters of nodes and automatically provision itself with any Docker ready scheduler. Data persistence is ensured across nodes, enabling storage policies such as class of service, IOPS and availability to be set at the container level. Additionally, it provides container-granular snapshots and replication. Enterprises can also use PX-Enterprise to quickly provision storage for containerized apps, manage features on a per-container basis, provision and schedule storage to automatically respond to container bursts, and run storage at bare-metal speeds.

“Like containers themselves, Portworx container-defined storage is radically simple, and the cost-savings are undeniable,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO and co-founder of Portworx, in a statement. “For the first time, we’ve eliminated the complex and expensive decision of purchasing storage for containers in production. Portworx will enable enterprises of all sizes to realize the true potential of containers”.

PX-Enterprise’s key features include scale-out block storage deployed as a container, granular storage capacity, performance and availability controls, and replication, adding an extra measure of redundancy.

The solution can be deployed in the cloud, or on-premises, or in both, which helps to prevent vendor lock-in.

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