Pure Storage Japan announced that its data management platform for container environments, Portworx, will now support virtual machines (VMs). This feature will be implemented in the new version, Portworx Enterprise 3.3, which will be available in May 2025, and was announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, held in London in April 2025. Venkat Ramakrishnan, vice president and general manager of Portworx products at Pure Storage, USA, said that the background to this is that “user companies are under pressure to migrate to new destinations due to the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, which has led to rising license costs.” In the transition from VMware, there has also been a shift to other hypervisors such as Nutanix, but it is said that there is also a growing trend to take this opportunity to migrate from VMs to container environments. Ramakrishnan points out that “an increasing number of user companies are thinking that it would be a better choice to modernize the entire environment with an eye to the next 20 to 30 years, rather than migrating from VMware’s hypervisor, which is a legacy technology, to a hypervisor made by another company, which is also a legacy technology.”
Broadcom has accelerated the trend of migrating from VMs to containers. Since many user companies are already using container environments for cloud-native applications, the ability to integrate previously independent VM environments and container (Kubernetes) environments with KubeVirt will lead to operational management benefits. In order to realize this migration, Portworx, which can be used in a Kubernetes environment, can be used in conjunction with Portworx to support the migration when running VMs in a Kubernetes environment. Ramakrishnan said, “We have a track record of helping many user companies, including Fortune 50 companies, migrate from legacy VMware environments to modern Kubernetes environments. We also have ample experience in working with Red Hat to migrate to Red Hat OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization, which provides KubeVirt as one of the features of Red Hat OpenShift.”
Furthermore, he cited the reason for using Portworx in conjunction with a VM environment running on a Kubernetes environment as “many user companies want to be provided with the same user experience (UX) that VMware has provided in the past.” He said, “Since many user companies have personnel who are familiar with the operation and management of VMware environments, we help them map workflows and enable them to operate with the same workflow as before as much as possible, helping to reduce the number of new elements they need to learn.” From this perspective, Portworx also has an advantage. Portworx can be a bridge for user companies when migrating from VMware environments to Kubernetes environments, and even if user companies stop using VMs and rewrite their applications to be compatible with containers in the future, they can continue to use Portworx as a data platform. The Japanese market is lagging behind in the transition to containers compared to the US and other markets, but the company is working with partner companies in Japan to strengthen information provision to the domestic technology community and provide educational opportunities.
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In addition, although the company did not have permission to disclose the name at this time, a certain telecommunications company is operating a large-scale container platform as a system infrastructure for 5G, and Portworx is being used as a storage platform for the production environment, and various implementation cases have also emerged in the manufacturing industry. Ramakrishnan said, “It is true that the transition to a container environment in Japan is somewhat slow, but there are large-scale cases and the number of engineers with accumulated technology and know-how is increasing, so there is no doubt that the number of cases will increase and best practices will be shared, and the pace of implementation will accelerate.”
SOURCE: Yahoo
