Portworx Adds Kubernetes Professional Services
Portworx, a provider of storage software optimized for containers, is making available a set of services through which it will make available consultants to help organizations set up Kubernetes infrastructure.
Sarvesh Jagannivas, chief marketing officer for Portworx, says one of the biggest inhibitors of Kubernetes adoption is a lack of skills. To enable organizations to overcome that hurdle, Portworx has assembled and trained its own Kubernetes professional services team.
The services offering from Portworx range from a Container Pilot Success Starter Pack and two-day training workshops lead by Portworx engineers to a 30-day Container Production Readiness Pack through which Portworx engineers will deploy a Kubernetes cluster and all the associated storage required.
Jagannivas says that while reliance on containers is already widespread, enterprise IT organizations that want to deploy containerized applications in an on-premises IT environment don’t have the skills needed to deploy Kubernetes within their own data center environments. Portworx, in effect, is trying to expand the size of the total market for its container storage platform by providing the skills organizations need to deploy Kubernetes.
A recent survey of 501 IT professionals conducted by the market research Market Cube on behalf of Portworx and container security platform provider Aqua Security finds 71% of respondents say they now run at least 40% of their application portfolio in containers. The primary reasons organizations are making that shift are to increase developer productivity and more efficient use of IT infrastructure. However, most of those applications are stateless. Enterprise IT organizations are just now starting to build and deploy stateful containerized applications requiring access to persistent forms of storage.
Kubernetes is also at the heart of most organizations’ evolving hybrid cloud computing strategies. Most organizations would prefer not to be locked into a specific cloud platform. Kubernetes will make it simple for organizations to move workloads between both multiple clouds and their on-premises IT environments. That latter capability is especially critical when it becomes more expensive to run an application in the cloud than in an on-premises IT environment.
Of course, there’s a whole cadre of IT services providers, but Jagannivas notes many of them have been slow to ramp up Kubernetes practices. At the same time, he says, it’s clear Kubernetes is about to transform storage in the enterprise—Kubernetes makes it possible for organizations to rely on much less expensive commodity storage instead of proprietary storage. Portworx, which recently raised another $27 million in funding and counts Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NetApp among its investors, will provide the storage management software needed to make that transition, Jagannivas says.
Of course, inertia is a powerful force in the enterprise. IT organizations often resist change simply because they don’t want to have to learn how to master yet another platform. However, the amount of flexibility that containers and Kubernetes enable are too compelling to ignore as long as they can access large amounts of data.
