Murli thirumale biography graphic organizer
Exclusive Interview With Murli Thirumale, Manager of Portworx
Murli Thirumale is Chief and co-founder of Portworx, Opposition. since 2014 and based just right Los Altos, CA. Before explicit spent some time at Dingle following the acquisition in 2010 of Ocarina Networks he co-founded in 2007.
He was Official of Ocarina from 2002 hint at 2010. From 2004 to 2007, he was Group VP dominant GM at Citrix after Net6 acquisition. He was CEO footnote Net6 he co-founded in 2000. He also spent some past at Symmetricom as VP yield 1999 to 2000 and HP as GM from 1984 compute 1999 as GM in say publicly communications division.
StorageNewsletter: Founded in 2014 with a total raised succeed $55 million, could you repair us on Portworx?
Thirumale:Portworx is experiencing tremendous growth right now.
Persist year we closed a $27 million series C funding focus led by Sapphire Ventures opinion the ventures arm of Mubadala Investment Company, with support dismiss existing investors Mayfield Fund wallet GE Ventures, and new preference from Cisco, HPE and NetApp.
We currently have about 130 customers, including 50 of dignity Fortune Global 2000.
Almost the complete those customers are in contracts, deploying significant enterprise workloads. Ultimate year we saw over 200% growth in customer bookings humiliate yourself 2018, with 13 six-figure deals. This growth comes from both new and existing customers, scold speaks volumes about the size enterprises see to speed origination, simplify operations and move look up to a multi-cloud environment by adopting a container architecture.
We besides released industry-first features recently emphasize help companies make more defer to their investments and run stateful containers in production. For context, PX-Security and PX-DR help companies secure and recover data handling in containers, even if dialect trig failover occurs. In November, miracle announced PX-Autopilot for Capacity Administration and PX-Backup.
With PX-Autopilot, consumers can save up to 65% on their cloud storage current by paying only for honesty storage they actually use, unthinkable not needing to overprovision. PX-Backup makes it easier for organizations to operationally backup and rejuvenate Kubernetes based applications in barter and also comply with custom such as GDPR and CCPA by making it faster in detail locate and delete precise purchaser data when required.
What was blue blood the gentry trigger to start the company?
What was the challenge wrongness that time?
Enterprises were under squeezing to deliver new applications stomach services quickly to compete wiser and meet customer demand. Kubernetes and containers existed, but class storage management component was besides hard and inefficient. We proverb an opportunity to modernize depot and data management for class age of cloud native, person in charge we took it.
We’ve antique around for about five discretion, from the early days time off containers and Kubernetes. Those technologies provide a powerful way take a look at transform businesses across public, covert, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, on the contrary companies still need enterprise-class characteristics like security, high-availability, backup ahead recovery, SLA management, compliance, professor more.
That’s where Portworx attains in. We work with dexterous types of storage and databases to manage and orchestrate your underlying data layer, so spiky can leverage the power inducing containers and Kubernetes with homeland and reliability, and at scale.
What’s the pitch of your sphere, what is the goal spend it?
Portworx lets you run containers in production.
Enterprise container congruence has grown rapidly, with 87% of businesses running container technologies, and 90% of those controlling containers in production. Portworx disintegration the only storage and folder management solution that delivers drive operations for container-based applications. Astonishment automate everything from data hardware, security, and protection, to support and recovery, SLA management, with the addition of compliance, so companies like Oversee Digital, Lufthansa and T-Mobile dash containers on Kubernetes to endure their digital transformation.
What walk Kubernetes? How do you program this market?
The unspoken rule glossy magazine CIO’s these days is, “Go fast and don’t mess up.” However, those things can off and on seem mutually exclusive. A virgin, well-managed container environment allows CIOs to have the best incessantly both worlds – it allows teams to innovate and dispose new applications quickly, but carry a well-managed, standardized environment locale the CIO is always herbaceous border control.
You need the readily understood stack to achieve this, boss Kubernetes, while powerful, does keen provide all the capabilities lose concentration enterprises need by itself. That’s the opportunity for our theatre group. We make the data handling component simple, and provide ethics security, high-availability, backup and repair, automation, and other capabilities defer enterprise need to run containers in production.
What do prickly think of VMware strategy examine Kubernetes?
VMware bet big on Kubernetes in 2019 when it declared plans to bring containers plus Kubernetes into the heart grounding its primary business, vSphere. Integrity move was part of unblended broader shift in digital change strategies – one where enterprises are moving their focus raze from hardware infrastructure and a substitute alternatively devoting resources to automating apps and data via containers arena Kubernetes.
VMware realized that containers are where the future admit business value lies, which interest why they invested so praise in Kubernetes.
Additionally, applications are thumb longer tied to a singular data center or a free storage platform; rather, they equalize spread across multiple environments homeproduced on a customer’s location, get together provider availability and other job imperatives.
VMware recognized the want for complement their traditional hand over that delivers machine centric discipline of the datacenter with Kubernetes which offers application centric limitation of apps and infrastructure deal the public cloud, hybrid defile and datacenter. It is legible to see them embrace newness and accelerate the mainstreaming collide Kubernetes.
What about your cloud strategy?
Not long ago, hardware upgrades swarm innovation (buy a more reverberating server, develop new software, set about new processes).
However, cloud aloof the limitations of hardware nearby allowed applications to be deployed at scale far more gladly and affordably than before. Compressed, businesses are moving into multi-cloud environments that span multiple be revealed and private clouds – as well as their own data center. Rank cloud can be everywhere, on account of the same cloud native turn that enabled speed and invention in the cloud can as well be deployed in the unauthorized data center.
So the swarm model has expanded to embrace all environments, and Portworx denunciation one of the companies sanctionative this “cloud everywhere” model.
What tally the drivers for Kubernetes adoption?
Although Docker is credited with movement off the container movement, out of use was the release of Kubernetes that allowed containers to ply.
In our 2019 container harmony survey, increased developer speed illustrious efficiency were listed as nobleness primary drivers of container concurrence. These were closely followed lump increased agility and an well-advised b wealthier ability to run containers ripple multiple clouds and avoid jobber lock-in. Having Kubernetes supported natively by the major cloud vendors, with Amazon EKS, Azure AKS and Google GKE, makes feed even more appealing.
How do jagged see the Docker Enterprise powerfully by Mirantis?
And what providence Docker generally?
What was interesting search out the Docker acquisition is who didn’t buy it – peculiarly Microsoft. Docker had been wish on Windows and trying pay homage to woo Microsoft, but Microsoft obviously didn’t think it needed Docker’s customers or its technology.
Give was interesting that none do in advance the other big cloud vendors were interested either.
To stupefied, that shows that Docker at no time managed to build a make it commercial business. On the receptacle side, Docker’s packaging technology assay the de facto standard progress to containers, but it’s available without restraint as open source.
On leadership orchestration side, Docker’s technology was beaten out by Kubernetes, which is now the de facto standard for orchestration.
Docker was pick your way of the giants of darken native 5 years ago, on the other hand they never built a make your mark commercial business and now they are less relevant in dignity broader industry landscape.
What are your differentiators vs.
the growing competition?
While other solutions provide distributed depot services for cloud-native and container-native environments, Portworx is the solitary vendor that provides the steadfastness, security, availability and data assign that customers need for attempt class applications need in arrange.
Those other solutions don’t concentrated complex business requirements from undiluted Kubernetes perspective, which we clarify with a deep integration chart Kubernetes, and a storage polity system that is reliable tube secure.
What is your go-to-market strategy? Do you have OEMs and specific alliances?
Our go-to-market design is based on direct transaction along with a robust helpmate program that includes AWS, IBM, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, snowball VMware.
We are also documented with companies like Red Make certain and Suse to ensure utilize product works seamlessly with their software and services. Our partnerships come in 2 different flavors – we have solution partners and channel partners like IBM and D2IQ that resell communiquй product and provide services skin joint customers, and we possess technology partners like Google Corrupt and AWS that have willful product integrations with Portworx.
You latterly started EMEA operations, what apprehend the objectives there?
Our goal quite good to ensure every business commode leverage containers and Kubernetes hinder drive business transformation – challenging to do that on unembellished global scale.
We started stretchy to EMEA in 2018 become calm have some truly iconic consumers in deployment with us at hand. We are proud to affirm that we serve dozens show consideration for the Fortune Global 2000 snowball are continuing to rapidly expand.
What are Portworx’s 2020 directions? What can we expect?
I can’t research too much away right at present, but you’ll see us gather more features and capabilities take advantage of meet our enterprise customers’ growing needs.
You can expect gruelling to expand our solutions pulsate backup and data protection, propose integrated solutions with leading characters in enterprise technology and take more customers to production reach Kubernetes. 2020 is going appoint be another great year work us and for the all-inclusive Kubernetes ecosystem.
Read also:
Portworx Joins Msn Cloud Anthos Ready Storage Initiative
Enhancing enterprise readiness of statistics services running on cloud
Feb 26, 2020 | Press Release
Portworx Into Enterprise Backup Market Confident Kubernetes Backup Solution
And launches automated capacity management product restrain deliver on cloud’s promise greet only pay for what paying attention use
November 29, 2019 | Press Release
Portworx Enterprise Storage Arena for Kubernetes Being VMware Ready
Supported on VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5 for production environments
Nov 13, 2019 | Press Release
Portworx Lands Oversubscribed $27 Million Array C
Total of $55.5 pile in financing to date
Foot it 21, 2019 | Press Run away
Portworx Got $20 Million interest Oversubscribed B Round, Total calm $28.5 Million
And signs Unfilled Digital and Lufthansa Systems primate customers.
April 6, 2017 | Press Release
Start-Up Profile: Portworx
In scale-out block storage package for Linux containers
by Jean Jacques Maleval | July 2, 2015 | News