In the days leading up to DockerCon, it seems like storage is taking its turn at being the hot topic in containers, with CoreOS and EMC recently announcing container-storage projects.

Today, Portworx is up. The Redwood City, Calif.-based startup released a developer version of its container storage platform last year, and it's now launching an enterprise version called PX-Enterprise.

As is typical with containers and cloud environments, the idea is to create a pool of resources — storage, in this case — to be tapped at will.

Portworx's target customers are running stateful applications — databases, mostly — in containers. As an alternative to storage-area networking (SANs), they'd like to take advantage of storage in an ad hoc manner. Part of Portworx's goal is to spin up storage controllers in container form, so that they can be created as quickly as container-based applications can be.

The startup also claims to add some smarts to this storage. It's resilient, so that if the host running the PX-Enterprise container goes down, the application can find its replacement automatically. And it can be set to handle replication automatically.

One way to sum this up is that Portworx's storage stays aligned with an application's state. "Even though containers are discussed as if they were stateless, people are running stateful applications, and they're asking what to do," says Eric Han, Portworx's senior product director.

PX-Enterprise is targeted at IT departments, as opposed to last year's PX-Developer, a free (but not open source) offering that targets individual developers. PX-Developer is limited to three servers, and it lacks the graphical user interface that PX-Enterprise has.

Founded in 2014, Portworx raised $8.5 million from sources including Mayfield and MSD Capital, the venture group created by Michael Dell. The company now has about 20 employees.

The executive team's pedigree mixes storage and containers. CEO Murli Thirumale is one of three executives formerly with Ocarina, a deduplication startup acquired by Dell in 2010.

On the container side, Han spearheaded Google’s early container efforts and was a founder of Kubernetes, the open source project focused on container orchestration.

Photo: Brett Jordan on Flickr. CC2.0 license. Photo has been cropped.