Portworx adds anti-ransomware to PX-Backup for Kubernetes

Pure Storage will add anti-ransomware object locking in its Portworx PX-Backup product while the Portworx Data Services database-as-a-service offering and PX-backup-as-a-service will now be generally available, according to announcements from Pure at the KubeCon event in Spain.

Portworx is Pure Storage’s container storage and data protection platform. There were also some additions to the main product, Portworx Enterprise.

PX-Backup 2.2 has added object locking, which can be on any object storage, on-premise or in the cloud and including non-Pure Storage products. This is aimed at recovery from ransomware attacks, where customers can restore to existing copies of their data that have been placed beyond reach of bad actors by locking them.

Portworx will add SafeMode immutable snapshot functionality to PX-Backup in Q4 of 2022. SafeMode already exists as an immutable snapshot feature in Pure’s Purity operating system.

PX-Backup was originally launched in 2019 at Kubecon, to address pain points in addition to the core storage-related functionality tackled by Portworx as a data management tool for Kubernetes.

Meanwhile, a couple of products previously on limited programmes have gone to general availability. These include Portworx Data Services, which brings the ability to run and manage a range of databases in Kubernetes.

“It’s a single-click curated set of databases and Portworx can manage deployment from day one to day three,” said Venkat Ramankrishnan, vice-president for product engineering with Portworx. “Most platform admins don’t have wide skills in databases and vice versa with database admins and Kubernetes. It is aimed at filling these gaps in skills.”

Pure claims Portworx Data Services is the first Kubernetes database-as-a-service platform. It comes amid an identifiable trend among storage vendors to add database services to their cloud and container-oriented offerings, such as that enabled by Pure’s partnership with Snowflake and NetApp’s offer of database, messaging and workflow tools with Spot.

Data services – it includes databases, event handling and messaging platforms – supported include Cassandra, Kafka, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis and Zookeeper, with more to come. The service is billed via consumption-based pricing.

PX backup as-a service has also gone to general availability. It supports backup and restore of any Kubernetes services including Amazon EKS, Red Hat OpenShift, Google Kubernetes Engine, VMware Tanzu and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service. For now, however, auto detection of Kubernetes nodes and clusters is only available in AWS EKS.

Customers don’t need to be Pure Storage or Portworx customers to use PX backup as a service and it can be trialled for free on a small-scale basis. The service allows customers to point the software at any Kubernetes cluster and configure jobs, with backup targets possible on any container storage initiative-enabled storage.

Role-based access in Portworx backup has been enhanced with added levels of privilege for different users.

Finally, the main Portworx Enterprise product has been given the ability to control IOPS and bandwidth according to user and applications profile; 5G/edge and IPv6 deployment; unified – file, block and object – storage overlays, and high-performance storage with PX-Fast.