Today, NetApp announced the general availability of Astra, a service it hopes will enable application data protection and mobility for Kubernetes applications. At Pure, we believe that the best Kubernetes data-management experience for NetApp customers is an infrastructure-agnostic, application-focused data experience powered by Portworx®. This experience includes the mobility, data protection, performance, and security that have made Portworx a leader in Kubernetes storage and Kubernetes Data Protection.
Many Pure Storage® customers who run Portworx on top of their NetApp storage tell us that only Portworx provides the choice, features, and reliability they need for it. When we ask why, they give us three reasons.
Customers Want Multicloud… Today
Kubernetes is all about multicloud operations. And that’s why Portworx runs in production today in all the major public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM), on-premises, and in co-location facilities such as our recently announced partnership with Equinix Metal. NetApp Astra currently supports only Google Cloud.
Customers Want Choice in Storage Infrastructure
Because customers want multi-cloud, they want choice when it comes to their storage infrastructure. As a software-only solution, Portworx enables you to run your apps on any storage infrastructure, including on NetApp, and of course on Pure Storage and other vendors as well. Conversely, Astra is tightly coupled with ONTAP, thereby limiting customer choice.
Customers Want Kubernetes-native Solutions
The modern apps that run on it have completely different architectures than the traditional apps that came before them. Kubernetes was created because the compute management services available for VM-based applications (vSphere, Cloud Formation, Chef, and Puppet) were too limited for modern apps. It follows that the storage and data management systems for VM-based workloads also need to be architected for modern distributed applications like those running on Kubernetes.
Portworx was built from the ground up for Kubernetes, providing not just application-granular data management—like application-consistent backup and mobility—but support for the scale, density, and dynamism of Kubernetes environments. On the other hand, we believe that Astra is based on a less-resilient architecture that connects the same ONTAP you use for traditional applications to Kubernetes via a CSI driver called Trident. This approach provides not only the limited choice outlined above, but also risks poor reliability in the case of common Kubernetes failures.
Look to Portworx for the best data-management experience for NetApp.
More on NetApp:
NetApp FlexGroup: One More Layer Doesn’t Make C-Mode Scale Out
