At KubeCon 2026, Portworx® by Everpure unveiled new capabilities designed to address data challenges for running AI, virtual machines (VMs), and containerized workloads running on Kubernetes. These updates include pre-staged volumes for AI/ML workloads, the general availability of Kube Datastore (KDS) for VMs on Kubernetes, and expanded observability through the operations center.
More and more enterprises are looking to run agentic AI, VMs, and containerized workloads on a unified Kubernetes platform. The Portworx innovations unveiled today benefit data infrastructure and platform engineering teams by eliminating data friction, enabling AI workloads to access training data sets faster, and offering a predictable path to modernize VMs on Kubernetes without compromising on performance.
Alongside these product updates, Everpure has been named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for Container Data and Infrastructure Management Software. According to the IDC MarketScape, “Everpure’s Portworx offering is a good fit for enterprises running mission-critical VMs, containerized applications, or AI workloads on Kubernetes across multiple distributions or mixed storage that want integrated backup and Disaster Recovery. Everpure is actively developing virtualization platform feature parity into Portworx. Organizations interested in a seamless transition from VMs to containers should consider Portworx.”
Greg Muscarella, General Manager, Portworx, at Everpure, said:
“Enterprises need to build and scale new applications while modernizing existing ones without compromising availability or adding operational complexity. Portworx gives teams a consistent approach to running containers and VMs on Kubernetes and managing their data across public clouds and on-premises infrastructure. Our latest innovations, including Kube Datastore, help customers simplify storage management, recover faster from infrastructure failures, and use storage more efficiently. We believe our recognition as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape reflects our commitment to helping customers run mission-critical applications with confidence, from established enterprise workloads to new cloud-native services.”
“Enterprises need to build and scale new applications while modernizing existing ones without compromising availability or adding operational complexity. Portworx gives teams a consistent approach to running containers and VMs on Kubernetes and managing their data across public clouds and on-premises infrastructure. Our latest innovations, including Kube Datastore, help customers simplify storage management, recover faster from infrastructure failures, and use storage more efficiently. We believe our recognition as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape reflects our commitment to helping customers run mission-critical applications with confidence, from established enterprise workloads to new cloud-native services.”
Get AI inference workloads running faster
AI workloads can spend significant time waiting for the data to become available, especially when large model weights need to be repeatedly downloaded before an application can start.
With pre-staged volumes (expected Q1 2027), Portworx enables platform teams to distribute warm local copies of persistent volume data across cluster nodes. Storage policies help workloads select appropriate local copies when they start or move to another node. The result is reduced storage-related startup delays and faster recovery, particularly in AI environments where workloads are frequently scheduled, moved, or restarted.
Extending enterprise storage capabilities with Kube Datastore for VMs on Kubernetes
As enterprises accelerate VM migration into Kubernetes environments, their storage architecture must support the operational requirements of traditional virtualization and containerized applications.
Portworx manages data for VMs, containers, and AI workloads on Kubernetes across on-prem, cloud, and edge storage. Because each workload demands different storage requirements depending on where it runs, Portworx introduced Kube Datastore (KDS), now generally available on supported SAN arrays.
By supporting both dynamic and static pools, KDS delivers predictable storage placement and capacity controls that build on native array performance and resilience so workloads can be configured to run with fewer replicas.
Platform engineers benefit from a more efficient storage model with fast failover, executing day 2 operations like rebalancing and maintenance through Kubernetes-native workflows, without coordinating separate storage infrastructure procedures. VM admins gain familiar Datastore concepts and VM workflows, such as storage mobility, making the leap to Kubernetes intuitive and seamless.
Expanding the Portworx ecosystem
Portworx is also expanding platform support and the tools available to teams to monitor and manage Kubernetes storage and virtualization environments.
- Launch partner for Red Hat OpenShift 5: Red Hat OpenShift 5 reflects this industry shift, with an emphasis on simplifying operations across these workloads while improving on security, compliance, and infrastructure efficiency. They also require a resilient storage architecture that scales effortlessly. Portworx is available today to support customers deploying OpenShift 5.
- Operations center observability: Portworx now provides visibility into pool inventory, live migration progress, and hyperconvergence state, helping teams monitor storage and virtualization operations through a single interface.
- Bring-your-own-backup (BYOB) flexibility: Portworx is expanding support for third-party backup solutions alongside its own backup and disaster recovery capabilities, giving customers total flexibility in how they protect workloads.
As enterprises modernize their infrastructure, they’re increasingly managing different application architectures on the same underlying platforms. Portworx provides a common data management layer with workload-specific storage capabilities to help teams run, protect, and move those workloads across any Kubernetes environment.
To learn more, check out these resources:
- IDC MarketScape analyst report
- KDS GA blog
