Container storage and data services company Portworx announced today that it has raised $20 million in a Series B led by Sapphire Ventures as well as new investors including GE Ventures. Mayfield and other Series A investors also contributed, bringing the company’s total funding to $28.5 million.

Portworx will use funding to expand on the integrations that it already has with container services like Docker and Kubernetes and to build new ones. It also plans to grow its sales and partner network, said Murli Thirumale, CEO and co-founder at Portworx.

Portworx solves some of the issues developers are faced with when taking containers into production. Specifically, Portworx saves and stores container data by providing container storage. Typically a container’s data will stand outside of the container, Thirumale said.

“When you run Portworx, we aggregate data into one large pool of storage, then we fingerprint all of those nodes, and we store that,” Thirumale said. “When a container is run on any of the nodes that were fingerprinted, we will carve out a virtual volume from the underlying block pool of storage and will attach it directly to that container.”

Portworx also provides automated data services, including data persistence and security. Data persistence makes sure that no matter where the data is running — in a set of clouds or in nodes — containers will always have access to the correct data, based upon its fingerprint.

These services are also integrated into the DevOps toolchain. For example, developers typically will use services like Kubernetes or Docker to containerize an application and then schedule its deployment. “But then to store the data they’d have to go outside that service and manually request the data and specify how long they wanted it backed up for,” Thirumale said.

Thirumale said that some of the company's biggest competitors are traditional storage companies like Dell EMC and HPE. However, Portworx differentiates by integrating with Docker and Kubernetes. Portworx’s software is also packaged as a container itself with all of the included services.

The Los Altos, California-based company was founded at the end of 2014 and has about 30 employees.