Portworx Launches Kube Datastore, Operations Center and Virtbench 2.0 for VMs and AI on Kubernetes
SALT LAKE CITY -- Portworx by Everpure announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 a set of updates to its data platform for virtual machines, containerized applications and AI workloads running on Kubernetes. The headline release is Kube Datastore (KDS), now generally available in Portworx Enterprise 3.7.2 on Everpure FlashArray and Red Hat OpenShift, which brings the datastore model familiar to VM administrators to Kubernetes.
With KDS, storage pools are carved from a shared SAN array, and when a node fails they reattach to a healthy node with no data copy and no replica rebuild. Portworx also introduced Operations Center, an in-cluster interface that brings cluster health, alerts, infrastructure relationships, performance metrics and diagnostics together. It includes a topology map spanning storage nodes, pools, volumes, workloads and virtual machines, plus a single alert view across Portworx and Prometheus alerts, replacing the need to piece together problems from pxctl, kubectl and Grafana.
Pre-Staged Volumes Target AI Inference Startup
For AI inference, Portworx previewed pre-staged volumes, which distribute copies of a versioned model bundle across eligible worker nodes so that each new inference pod mounts a local copy instead of downloading tens or hundreds of gigabytes of weights from a remote repository. The approach also supports blue/green rollouts of new model revisions and faster recovery when a node fails. Pre-staged volumes are expected in early 2027.
Virtbench 2.0 and Backup Updates for VMs on Kubernetes
The company also released Virtbench 2.0, its open source, vendor-neutral toolkit for testing KubeVirt environments, which adds concurrent mixed-operation testing, expanded migration scenarios, rewritten failure-recovery testing and an optional AI-assisted workflow. Portworx Backup 3.2.0, planned for general availability in November, adds select file restore for Windows VMs and IPv6-only and dual-stack cluster support, while Portworx Enterprise 3.8.0, planned for early 2027, will support the upstream Kubernetes change block tracking standard (KEP-3314) so third-party backup tools can copy only changed data. Portworx also announced day-one support for Red Hat OpenShift 5 and a storage-offload migration path for FlashArray customers that the company said moves VMs off VMware up to 12 times faster.
