6 Ways Portworx Helps Mitigate Rising Storage and Memory Costs

Memory and storage costs are increasing across the industry, and the pressure is coming from multiple directions at once. DRAM, NAND flash, and high-performance storage tiers are all seeing sustained price increases. These shifts are not short-term disruptions. They reflect structural changes in how memory and storage are consumed globally.

AI has become the dominant force shaping supply and demand. Training and inference workloads require massive amounts of memory and fast storage, and hyperscalers are securing long-term supply to meet those needs. At the same time, manufacturing capacity remains constrained, and new fabs take years to come online. Enterprises now face higher prices, longer lead times, and less flexibility in procurement.

Industry analysts have consistently highlighted this trend. TrendForce has reported consecutive quarters of double-digit price increases for both DRAM and NAND, citing AI demand, constrained supply, and supplier pricing discipline as primary drivers. TrendForce analysis also notes that near-term supply relief is unlikely given long fab lead times and prioritization of AI-focused memory production.

As a result, a growing share of enterprise infrastructure spend reflects price inflation rather than proportional growth in usable capacity. Gartner and IDC have both noted that storage cost optimization is becoming a board-level concern as enterprises struggle to absorb higher unit costs without expanding footprint. For IT leaders, the challenge is shifting from how much capacity is needed to how efficiently existing capacity is used.

Enterprise infrastructure remains essential. Performance, reliability, and vendor support still matter. What has changed is the margin for inefficiency and the cost of inflexibility.

What the market is telling us:

• Virtualization and storage are in a cost reckoning, driven by licensing shifts, AI workloads, and hardware price shocks.
• Unpredictable renewals and surprise fees are eroding trust in legacy platforms.
• Practitioners want vendors who are transparent about constraints while protecting customers as much as possible.

6 ways enterprises can mitigate rising memory and storage costs and how Portworx helps

1. Apply storage governance at the application and workload level

Multiple analyst studies and customer assessments show that 30%–50% of allocated application storage is typically underutilized. Gartner has repeatedly cited overprovisioning as a leading contributor to unnecessary storage growth, particularly in environments where developers provision for peak demand and never resize.

A common enterprise scenario involves a database provisioned with a 10TB volume where steady-state usage remains under 5TB. Daily snapshots, cloned environments, and retained backups can push total consumed capacity past 20TB within months. Similar patterns are widely observed in VM-based workloads running on Kubernetes, where virtual disks are sized conservatively and rarely revisited.

Across dozens or hundreds of workloads, this behavior quietly consumes premium storage without a corresponding increase in business value.

Portworx® enables application and workload aware storage governance across Kubernetes, including support for VMs running on Kubernetes. Policies for quotas, performance tiers, and snapshot behavior can be defined once as “golden paths” by Platform teams and applied consistently, independent of the underlying storage platform. For many teams, that governance  reduces wasted capacity   and turns storage into a line item they can actually predict at renewal time.  

2. Improve utilization with thin provisioning and space efficiency

It’s common in enterprises for only a fraction of of provisioned storage to be actively used. In Kubernetes environments, this gap is often larger because  it is harder to predict with precision how much storage an application will require within a container environment, especially when it is being migrated from a VM environment. 

Enterprises frequently report environments where 400 to 600TB is provisioned, while actual written data remains under 300TB. The unused capacity still drives procurement decisions, accelerating purchases at a time when flash prices are rising sharply.

Similar to dynamic application scaling in Kubernetes, Portworx supports thin provisioning and space-efficient storage operations across a wide range of backend storage platforms. Physical capacity is consumed only as data is written, not when volumes or virtual disks are created, helping reduce the gap between allocated and used storage.

3. Consolidate containers and VMs while maintaining resilience and performance

Development and staging clusters are often lightly utilized, yet still consume dedicated storage and memory to maintain isolation and availability. In environments where containers and VMs are run on separate platforms, this fragmentation further drives up overall capacity needs. By contrast, a more consolidated approach helps reduce this overhead by improving how infrastructure is shared and utilized across workload.

Portworx reinforces the higher-density advantage of containerized deployments on Kubernetes by aligning storage with the same scheduling and pooling model as compute allowing capacity to be shared efficiently across many workloads instead of being siloed per application or VM. This reduces the storage footprint per-workload and enables more applications to run on the same underlying infrastructure. With more companies deploying VMs alongside containers on Kubernetes, organizations have a straightforward path to consolidate platforms without forcing immediate refactoring. Teams can start by running VMs on Kubernetes and then containerize applications over time as it makes sense, progressively increasing infrastructure utilization while modernizing at their own pace.

4. Manage data lifecycle and placement across storage platforms

Storage assessments conducted by analysts and system integrators routinely show that 40% to 60% of data on high-performance storage tiers has not been accessed in 60 to 90 days. Logs, historical snapshots, and inactive data sets often remain on premium tiers because migration is complex, risky, or tightly coupled to a specific storage platform. Fear of disruption is one of the primary reasons enterprises delay data movement, even when lower-cost storage options are available.

Portworx abstracts workloads from the underlying storage, enabling data mobility across storage platforms without application or VM changes. Data placement can be adjusted over time, without fear,  based on performance and cost needs, reducing long-term spend.

5. Reduce backup, disaster recovery, and migration overhead

Backup and disaster recovery environments can require storage capacity equal to or greater than primary production. In practice, a 200TB production environment might require another 200TB or more for backups, replicas, and standby systems. This is exaggerated in mixed container and VM environments, where separate tooling increases duplication and operational overhead, driving both capacity and cost higher.

At the same time, ransomware actors are increasingly treating backups as a primary target, which means simply copying data isn’t enough. Immutability, regular testing, and rapid recovery are becoming the new minimum bar. 

Portworx provides consistent snapshot, replication, and mobility capabilities for both containers and VMs running on Kubernetes. The same mechanisms used for protection can also support migration and platform refresh, reducing duplication and complexity.

6. Leverage modern virtualization with Portworx to reduce IT expenses and invest in other initiatives

Traditional virtualization infrastructure often operates in silos from modern cloud-native platforms, requiring separate storage management stacks, specialized teams, and distinct capacity planning. This fragmentation creates unnecessary complexity and high operational costs, diverting significant IT spend toward maintenance and duplication rather than forward-looking investments like AI or application modernization.

Portworx allows enterprises to consolidate legacy VM infrastructure by running VMs directly on Kubernetes, managed by the same platform that handles containers. This “modern virtualization” approach unifies data management and storage operations, eliminating the need for redundant tooling and dedicated legacy storage systems. In addition to the savings from better infrastructure utilization discussed above, the resulting reduction in licensing, operational overhead, and specialized hardware spend frees up budget, effectively turning IT efficiency into a pool of capital for investing in strategic, growth-driving initiatives.

Take back control with supported, flexible, and optimized infrastructure 

Through these market dynamics, infrastructure partners matter more than ever. Everpure continues to support customers through pricing volatility, supply constraints, and evolving workload demands, with a focus on platform stability, enterprise support, and long-term customer value.

Rising memory and storage prices reflect lasting shifts in global supply and demand. These pressures will persist as AI continues to reshape infrastructure consumption.If you’re running Kubernetes, operating VMs on Kubernetes, or modernizing stateful applications, now is the right time to assess where storage is overprovisioned, underutilized, or difficult to move. 

Portworx by Everpure  provides an abstraction and control layer that works across any backend storage and supports both containers and VMs on Kubernetes. This flexibility allows enterprises to optimize placement, reduce migration costs, and adapt storage strategy as infrastructure economics change.  Additionally, our solution can help you introduce governance, thin provisioning, and data mobility on your kubernetes environments so you can unlock more value from your platform investments.

To learn more, attend our webinar: Why Data Platforms Are Breaking in Banking and Beyond: Fixing Storage for VMs, K8s, and AI

AMS Webinar, May 19th at 10 AM PT: https://purefla.sh/48xxgYJ

EMEA Webinar, May 20th at 10 AM CET: https://purefla.sh/4nj9E09