Pure Storage dove head first into containers today announcing that it will purchase Portworx in a $370 million, all-cash deal.

Under the deal, Pure Storage will gain the cloud-native storage provider's technology and team of engineers that will form a new Cloud Native Business Unit led by Portworx CEO Murli Thirumale and co-founders Goutham Rao and Vino Jayaraman.

“Portworx has distinguished itself as the leader in this space, and we saw an opportunity to create the broadest platform,” said Matt Kixmoeller, Pure Storage VP of strategy. “The combination of Pure and Portworx was an opportunity to deliver an end-to-end solution for customers at every stage of the cloud-native journey.”

Portworx is a software-defined storage platform built for containers and microservices. The Los Altos, California-based company was founded at the end of 2014 and raised $55.5 million in three funding rounds. Most recently, it closed a $27 million Series C round in March 2019.

Its storage platform targets customers running stateful applications — like databases — in containers. It offers the ability to spin up storage controllers in container form to match the speed of container-based application creation. 

At the online KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 in August, Portworx released a bevy of updates to its enterprise portfolio of storage software for Kubernetes clusters. With more automation, backup and restore features, and performance improvements, the updates are  designed to appeal to IT organizations that are beginning to implement stateful containerized application deployments across fleets of Kubernetes clusters.

Pure Storage plans to build upon Portworx’s momentum by continuing to sell the existing Portworx platform as-is and extending it to the vendor's global channels, Kixmoeller said. Once the acquisition is complete, the two parties will “work to define a unified roadmap that converges Portworx and Pure Service Orchestrator into a unified software stack for container storage to provide seamless options across cloud, commodity server, and enterprise all-flash array deployments,” he added. 

Moving forward, Pure Storage also plans to accelerate investment in the Portworx standalone roadmap. According to Kixmoeller the company will invest in “relevant integrations between Pure and Portworx products,” including Pure Service Orchestrator container-storage orchestration software.

Containers were initially viewed as a perfect match for stateless applications that did not require stored data to operate or support a running application. Their marital success has lured the attention of organizations that seek to allow for containers to tap into a central data repository so that they can support stateful applications.

The challenge in container storage is meeting applications performance requirements that are free from the burden of physical servers. This is easier said than done. 

That said, no matter the unrelenting pestery plaguing container storage, vendors young and old have been spinning out updates and “first-of-a-kind” product lines to milk this market opportunity for all its worth. 

Diamanti went deep in the latest update of Spektra with a ready-made appliance that hosts containers, and more importantly, handles the networking and storage requirements for them — which is a particularly handsome service for organizations that want to run container workloads on-premises in their own data centers.     

Additionally, NetApp launched Project Astra, an enterprise-class storage and data services platform for Kubernetes that enables both application and data portability. And in June, Rancher Labs made Longhorn available as a cloud-native container storage service to enable vendor-neutral persistent storage that supports stateful workloads on Kubernetes clusters.