Portworx
What they do: Provide software-defined storage for container environments.
Problem they solve: Enterprise investment in container technologies and associated personnel is on the rise. However, in order for container technology to reach mainstream adoption in the enterprise, the container ecosystem of vendors, including the likes of Portworx, must provide DevOps teams with adequate tools to successfully deploy containers at scale across any environment.
According to Portworx, the five most common obstacles to achieving this goal that DevOps teams experience when running containerized databases and other stateful services in production are:
- Maintaining persistent volumes (i.e., ensuring there is no data loss when your containers fail).
- Maintaining high availability via smart provisioning, replication, and failover to keep your apps up.
- Automating with schedulers. (Deep integration with the most popular container schedulers is easier said than done).
- Securing your data.
- Consistently manage any database on any infrastructure.
How they solve it: Portworx provides scheduler-integrated data services for enterprises running containers in production. With Portworx, users can deploy stateful containers on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid clouds. Unlike legacy storage with container connectors or systems built on key-value stores, Portworx is purpose built for cloud-native applications, making container data portable, persistent, and protected.
Portworx argues that its technology is especially well-suited for solution verticals such as databases, messaging queues, continuous integration, and continuous deployment (CICD), as well as Big Data and content management.
Headquarters: Los Altos, CA
CEO: Murli Thirumale. Thirumale previously co-founded Ocarina, a deduplication startup that was acquired by Dell, and served as its CEO. He also was the co-founder and CEO of Net6.
Year Founded: 2014
Funding: $28.5 million in total. The most recent round was a $20 million B-Round, which closed in April 2017. The funding round was led by Sapphire Ventures and included new investor GE Ventures. Mayfield and other Series A investors also contributed to this round.
Competitors include: Diamanti, Robin Systems, Nexenta, and StorageOS, among others.
Customers include: GE Digital, Lufthansa Systems, University of Toronto, and TGen.
Why they’re in the Big 50-2017: Portworx did well in Big50 online voting, and they closed a big Series B round in 2017. Even better, the startup announced such big-name customers as GE Digital and Lufthansa Systems. Add in a strong leadership team, and Portworx is well-positioned in this fast-growing market.
