Portworx Launches Kube Datastore on FlashArray
The Kubernetes storage update runs on Everpure FlashArray and Red Hat OpenShift, with new management and VM testing tools announced at KubeCon North America.
Updated on Nov. 11, 2026 in Data Centers
Portworx by Everpure announced Kube Datastore on Everpure FlashArray and Red Hat OpenShift at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026, alongside Operations Center and Virtbench 2.0. Kube Datastore is generally available in Portworx Enterprise 3.7.2.
Why it matters
The release targets enterprises running Kubernetes and virtual machines on shared storage arrays, offering a path to keep storage pools available when nodes fail. It also gives customers a migration route off VMware with a storage-offload option.
Kube Datastore carves storage pools from a shared SAN array, and when a node fails the pools reattach to a healthy node with no data copy or replica rebuild. The 12-times faster VM migration figure is a vendor claim, and the comparison baseline was not specified.
The players
Portworx by Everpure
Portworx is a Kubernetes storage and data management provider that Everpure acquired and now markets under its own brand.
Red Hat OpenShift
OpenShift is Red Hat's enterprise Kubernetes platform, widely used to run containerized applications in corporate data centers.
The details
Portworx introduced Operations Center, an in-cluster interface showing a topology map of storage nodes, pools, volumes, workloads and virtual machines, with a single alert view across Portworx and Prometheus alerts. The company also released Virtbench 2.0, an open source, vendor-neutral toolkit for testing KubeVirt environments, and Portworx Backup 3.2.0, which adds select file restore for Windows VMs.
Timeline
November 2026: Portworx Backup 3.2.0 is planned for general availability.
Early 2027: Pre-staged volumes and Portworx Enterprise 3.8.0 are expected.
The Tech Race
The launch extends KubeVirt, the open-source project that runs virtual machines inside Kubernetes, as enterprises seek alternatives to VMware. It positions Portworx against other storage vendors competing to serve Kubernetes-based virtualization.
Enterprise platform teams running Kubernetes can use the Kube Datastore storage pools to keep workloads running after node failures without waiting for data rebuilds. Teams weighing a move off VMware can evaluate the storage-offload migration path and the new Windows VM file restore.
The takeaway
Enterprises planning to consolidate virtual machines onto Kubernetes should test storage failover and migration paths before committing, since the performance figures so far come from the vendor.
What happens next
Portworx Backup 3.2.0 is planned for general availability in November 2026, and Portworx Enterprise 3.8.0 is planned for early 2027.
Further reading
For more on how shared storage underpins modern facilities, see Data Centers.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Cloud Native Now.
