This article is sourced from "DOIT"

At the end of August during the VMworld 2019 conference, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger stated: "We (VMware) are fully committed to Kubernetes." In contrast, a company that had already fully embraced Kubernetes back in 2014 is the U.S. container storage company Portworx. Portworx is a storage and data management platform native to Kubernetes. Now, this technology company, which originated in the United States, is actively expanding its business in China. In order to quickly penetrate the domestic market and promote container technology to Chinese enterprises, Portworx has entered into a strategic partnership with Futong Cloud.

Portworx, Deeply Engaged in Kubernetes for Five Years

Research by data statistics firm 451 Research indicates that 76% of companies will be using Kubernetes within three years. As early as 2014, when Google released Kubernetes, the founding team of Portworx foresaw the booming prospects of the container market and decided to establish a storage and data management platform native to Kubernetes. Dong Zhihua, General Manager of Portworx's Asia-Pacific region, stated: "The original purpose of Portworx's establishment was to manage container applications well and to handle data applications effectively."

Portworx, from the very beginning, was designed at the application layer for containerization, and its technology is already 16-18 months ahead of similar companies. Portworx primarily provides stateful container solutions designed for DevOps. With Portworx, users can manage all databases or stateful services on any architecture using any container scheduler, including Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS, and Docker Swarm, etc. Additionally, Portworx addresses the most common issues that DevOps teams encounter when running containerized databases and Docker stateful services in production environments.

Additionally, the Portworx solution has become a market partner for various public clouds, enabling enterprise customers to have more flexible container application deployment options, while also achieving high-availability production deployment levels across multiple data centers.

Currently within Kubernetes, Portworx is the most widely used data platform. It has a broad user base in North America and Europe, spanning various sectors including telecommunications, retail, automotive, and manufacturing, which includes industry giants such as T-Mobile, one of the four major U.S. telecommunications operators, General Electric, IBM, NIO Automobile, Carrefour, and Adobe . With the rapid adoption of cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence technologies in China, Portworx recognizes the opportunity to expand into the Chinese market, assisting Chinese enterprises in actively embracing and developing cloud-native, container, and open-source technologies, and applying them to their digital construction efforts.

Valuing Delivery Capability, Joining Hands with Futong Cloud

At present, the enterprise-level container application market in China is still in its infancy. In today's context of digital transformation, the majority of corporate CIOs have yet to focus on the positive changes that containers can bring, while overseas, container technology has already been adopted as a key application in digital transformation efforts.

Futong Cloud, which focuses on enterprise-level services, has also realized that container technology will bring disruptive breakthroughs to software development and system operations. With the popularization of container technology, the efficiency of enterprise system development and management is bound to reach a new level.

Futong Cloud possesses robust scientific research capabilities and technical strength. By addressing the pain points of enterprise cloud adoption, it offers "full-stack cloud management services" that encompass the entire lifecycle, including consulting and planning, migration and deployment, operations and maintenance management, system optimization, and personnel training. Futong Cloud genuinely takes customer needs as the starting point and focuses on the delivery of results. This aligns with the original intention of Portworx's services, which is that users do not need to make any investments, and Portworx helps users improve resource application efficiency based on existing resources.

“Establishing cooperation is not about reselling products. Portworx values Futong Cloud's ability to help customers transform traditional architectures into container platforms. Without profound experience in enterprise IT system services, it is impossible to understand and handle the complex enterprise system architectures.” Dong Zhihua of Portworx said.

Futong Cloud's Vice President in charge of product technology research and development, Dai Sihong, stated that cloud computing provides a good opportunity for enterprise innovation and development. By applying cloud-native design practices, containers, DevOps, and other technologies, enterprises can achieve digital transformation of IT infrastructure and improve overall operational efficiency.

“From the perspective of cloud applications, previously enterprise system architectures were in the consumption phase of virtualization. With the current transformation of automated deployment and development technologies, as well as the requirements for continuous development and continuous release of applications, customer applications also need more flexible architectures to support them. Container technology is becoming increasingly important, yet the industry lacks enterprise-grade container storage data management services. This is precisely the opportunity for Futong Cloud and Portworx to choose to cooperate.”

Based on Portworx's leading position in the field of container storage and Futong Cloud's many years of enterprise-level service experience, the two parties will carry out strategic cooperation in technology, products, and solutions. Relying on their respective capabilities to complement each other, they will expand the enterprise-level container application market and provide more high-quality products and services to Chinese enterprises. More and more enterprises are trending towards cloudification, and cloud-native architecture design, development, and deployment will fully utilize and leverage the elasticity and distributed advantages of cloud platforms, better promoting enterprise digital transformation.