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When it comes to data protection, Kubernetes falls short in today’s enterprise data centers. Unfortunately, many IT professionals aren’t aware of these limitations.

A recent survey by ESG highlights this issue. Seventy-five percent of IT professionals wrongly believe that containers can be backed up the same way as applications. Kubernetes is an exceptional tool for automating, scaling, and managing containerized applications. But, it doesn’t protect data or applications. And data protection in the enterprise is paramount.

Today, we’re announcing the first joint Pure Storage® and Portworx® solution. The solution combines FlashBlade®, our market-leading unified fast file and object (UFFO) solution, with Portworx PX-Backup. The solution provides Kubernetes-native data protection and rapid recovery for modern applications.

Learn more about the Portworx-Pure Storage Product Security Journey >>

Why Kubernetes Requires a Native Data Protection Solution

Containerized applications that use Kubernetes allow teams to innovate faster. Developers can use a repeatable process and application image that is completely portable in test, development, or production.

Figure 1: Application portability from test to production.

When it comes to managing the data these applications produce or consume, Kubernetes only offers some of the capabilities needed. It helps define how these “stateful applications” are specified by using a StatefulSet with persistent volumes, for example. It also uses the Container Storage Interface (CSI) to “enable storage vendors to develop a plug-in” so their solutions can work in a standard way to create, delete, attach, mount, and snapshot volumes. While this helps, it still requires an external storage system to protect applications.

CSI doesn’t understand what RPO and RTO levels or backup policies are. On top of this, traditional “pluggable” storage systems don’t understand Kubernetes configuration objects. This is a critical part of an application backup. Having a backup without the associated Kubernetes objects is only half of the picture. The backup unit for modern cloud-native applications is now both the app configuration and data.

Figure 2: Backup needs to include Kubernetes objects, app configuration, and data.

Protect Your Kubernetes Applications with FlashBlade and Portworx Enterprise

Integrating the Portworx Enterprise data services platform for Kubernetes with Pure Storage FlashBlade enables you to run applications on Kubernetes in production without fear of outages, failures, or disasters. With Pure Rapid Restore, you can recover in minutes in the event of a catastrophic failure.

Built from the ground up for Kubernetes, PX-Backup delivers enterprise-grade application and data protection with fast recovery at the click of a button. Data protection is container-granular, app-consistent, Kubernetes-namespace aware, inclusive of Kubernetes configuration, and multicloud—the essential elements of a native Kubernetes backup. A leader in Kubernetes data protection, Portworx Enterprise uses FlashBlade as a remote backup and data protection location tuned to deliver multidimensional performance for any data size and structure. It’s perfect for the dynamic workloads that run in modern cloud-native Kubernetes environments.

Portworx Enterprise data management and Pure Storage FlashBlade provide industry-leading on-prem and multicloud high-availability, disaster recovery and backup, and restore capabilities.

Make sure you have a complete Kubernetes data management and data protection solution. Check out the white paper and solution brief to learn more.

See how you can protect your organization’s Kubernetes applications with disaster recovery, backup and restore solutions from Pure Storage: