Portworx by Pure Storage (PX-Backup)

Portworx by Pure Storage (PX-Backup)

Portworx PX-Backup is a Kubernetes data protection solution. It works with any Kubernetes cluster, including OpenShift, Tanzu, EKS, AKS, and GKE, both on-premises and in the cloud.

PX-Backup has abandoned the necessity for Portworx Enterprise, its Kubernetes distributed data storage product, but it still supports it as a storage source.

In a Kubernetes cluster, PX-Backup is deployed as a Helm-based application. It’s also available on the AWS Marketplace, although no SaaS version is available. It’s a multi-cluster solution that just requires a single PX-Backup installation in an administrator cluster to secure any Kubernetes cluster on-premises or in the cloud. PX Central, being a manager-of-managers, can also centrally manage many PX-Backup instances.

It deploys customized Portworx components for each cluster it protects, as well as Stork, which bridges the gap between the PX-Backup server and the management cluster. Applications are allocated to a policy using namespace and label selectors, and backups are policy-based.

PX-Backup also works with any CSI-compatible storage, including Amazon EBS volumes, Google Persistent Disks, and Azure Managed Disks, to perform and speed up application-consistent backups. As backup targets, PX-Backup supports S3(-compatible), Azure Blob, and Google Cloud Storage. It now supports copying cloud provider snapshots (such as EBS snapshots) into an S3 bucket, as well as storing that snapshot in a separate region, in current versions. Data is secured at rest and in transit, which is a key feature of the product.

It does not, however, incorporate ransomware features such as immutability or anomaly detection.

PX-Backup offers built-in support for Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Jenkins, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ, as well as pre and post hooks.

It has mature RBAC capability and is multi-tenant aware. It connects with Kubernetes RBAC controls, according to Kubernetes scope constraints and permissions so that users can only interact with their respective namespaces or apps.

Based on Stork, Portworx provides sophisticated data migration and transformation capabilities that enable application and data migrations between clusters, whether on-premises or in the cloud. However, in addition to PX-Backup, these features require Portworx Enterprise to be deployed on both the source and target clusters.

It does offer backup-and-restore operations to migrate data to a new, heterogeneous cluster in situations without Portworx Enterprise.

While PX-Backup offers a free trial, there is no free version. Annual subscriptions and pay-as-you-go models based on $0.20 per node, per hour pricing with a 1,000 node-hours minimum are available as licensing alternatives.

PX-DR is a disaster recovery add-on solution for Portworx Enterprise that relies on synchronous and asynchronous data replication; however, PX-Backup does not offer these functionalities.

Strengths: A strong competitor in the data protection market that is well integrated into Portworx Enterprise, making it a suitable fit for individuals interested in data storage, data management, and enhanced disaster recovery in addition to data protection.

Challenges: While PX-Backup can be used without Portworx Enterprise, critical functionality such as disaster recovery via (a)synchronous replications and complex application migration and transformation require Portworx Enterprise’s storage layer. Future editions will include support for cloud data providers such as Amazon RDS and immutability features. Although a SaaS version is not currently available, it is being developed.